By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, August 18, 2008

Washington, which likes to think of itself as the indispensable city for high-stakes journalism, is losing its luster.

A full-blown withdrawal is underway, with newspaper companies reducing their troops here or pulling them out altogether.

"The folks back home see a Washington bureau as a luxury," says Bill Walsh, a former correspondent for the New Orleans Times-Picayune who recently left journalism. "They get plenty of copy from the wires to fill up their pages. I don't know that there's a real understanding of Washington."

The latest to pull the plug is the Newhouse News Service, which employs 11 reporters. Linda Fibich, the bureau chief, says the individual Newhouse papers, from Newark to New Orleans, will have to decide whether to pay for their own correspondents to be stationed in the capital.

"They know the issues, they know the characters," Fibich says. "I've watched people parachute into Washington, and they just don't have the same facility." Regional reporters, she says, "get embedded in Washington, just as reporters develop sources at City Hall or the school board. You go beyond stenography into enterprise."

The reason for this pullback is hardly a mystery. Newspapers are under fierce financial pressure, shrinking their staffs as advertising revenue plunges. Barely a day goes by without another grim announcement: The San Francisco Chronicle, offering buyouts to 125 journalists. The Cincinnati Enquirer, looking to cut 50. Florida's Sarasota Herald-Tribune, slicing its staff by a third in two years. Newhouse's Newark Star-Ledger, saying it will sell the paper unless the staff is cut by 20 percent.

In this climate, more editors are concluding that they should put all their eggs in the local-news basket.

But something is being lost. Regional reporting is a specialty that lacks the glamour of following the president around the world or popping off on cable television, but it's not a matter of journalistic vanity. Its practitioners follow the local congressional delegation and bird-dog federal agencies over matters important to their readers. Without them, there's a sizable gap between the national political writers and the local scribes back home.

David Lightman was the Hartford Courant's Washington bureau chief for 23 years, but in recent years the staff shrank from five to just him. Gone were the reporters who focused on defense and health-care issues, two vital areas for Connecticut. "The coverage obviously suffered. After '04 we never went to the White House anymore," says Lightman, who left last fall to join McClatchy Newspapers.

Maine's Portland Press Herald hired Jonathan Kaplan to be its Washington correspondent in December. His job was eliminated last month, and the Press Herald has put itself up for sale amid dire warnings about the company's future.

"I was crushed . . . . I will never look at someone who has lost his job the same way," Kaplan says. He says his brief tenure convinced him that "if you can get around the jargon we all talk in and make clear why this matters, it will be read."

Chuck McCutcheon spent six years with Newhouse's Washington bureau, first as one of a dozen national correspondents; there are now three. "We didn't go to press conferences and cover the story of the day," he says. "We were all trying to do broader trend stories."

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.