The 'Frill' Is Gone: Papers Forced to Cut D.C. Bureaus

McCutcheon, who calls the shuttering of the news service "devastating," was hired in 2002 to cover homeland security. "It was a hot topic," he says, "but as we got further from 9/11, fewer and fewer papers would run homeland security stories. Sometimes our copy got lost in the shuffle. It was obviously frustrating." He started at Congressional Quarterly two weeks ago.

Insiders expect the Tribune Co. to reduce its Washington presence by combining the bureaus of its two largest papers, the Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times. Some individual papers, such as Salt Lake's Deseret News, have shuttered their Washington bureaus, while others have downsized. The Philadelphia Inquirer is down to one reporter who does investigative stories. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette once shared four full-time Washington correspondents with its sister paper in Toledo; it has had no one here this year, although Executive Editor David Shribman says he hopes to add one reporter in the next month or so.

"Sometimes the local story isn't sitting right here in your Zip code or area code," says Shribman, a former Washington bureau chief of the Boston Globe. "Oftentimes it's in Washington. Nobody can afford the kind of Washington coverage we all used to do. We're in a struggle of trying to figure out how to provide the coverage we need and still stay within our economic constraints."

The journalists who cover the pols most intensively can get under their skin. In 2006, Rick Santorum, then a Pennsylvania senator, cursed at Brett Lieberman, the Washington reporter who covered him for the Harrisburg Patriot-News, saying: "I have to raise tens of millions of dollars because of the junk you feed the people of Pennsylvania." Lieberman lost his Washington post last week with the announced closing of the Newhouse bureau.

Walsh, the former Times-Picayune correspondent, said regional reporters in Washington specialize in "tracking who's getting the money and what favors these people are getting in return. Not to get on too high a horse, but it's vital to a healthy democracy. That's what's being lost, the real scrutiny for members of Congress."

But newspapers can no longer do it all. Times-Picayune Editor Jim Amoss plans to add a second Washington reporter but is not especially perturbed by the closing of the Newhouse bureau, which the chain's papers had underwritten. "If I were given a choice between thoughtful, original, national journalism practiced at our Washington bureau and intensive investigation of Louisiana matters, I would have to choose the latter," Amoss says. "In the end, the value of newspapers having vigorous local coverage trumps the kind of pieces a larger bureau was able to produce."

There is another factor as well. Newspapers are increasingly trying to peddle their wares online, where thousands of news snippets swirl around in an undifferentiated mass. People may follow a link from Yahoo or Drudge or the Huffington Post and read a single story on the newspaper site, which is very different from the way they peruse the ink-on-paper version.

In this environment, branding is the key, whether as the go-to place for news about Hollywood (the Los Angeles Times) or the Brett Favre soap opera (the Green Bay Press-Gazette). And it's difficult to market having the best Washington coverage of the Pennsylvania congressional delegation.

Perhaps the shift also reflects a boredom with Washington in the eighth year of the Bush presidency, at a time when terror alerts have faded and Congress seems gridlocked about everything. If so, more papers might shore up their bureaus at the start of an Obama or McCain administration. But unless Paris Hilton is given a Cabinet post, that's not very likely.