A new report further documents the evisceration of Washington’s capitol press corps as the state’s news industry shrank in recent years.
Sadly, this comes as new state leaders take office next week and the Legislature convenes with a $10 billion-plus budget deficit that will lead to policy changes affecting a generation of Washingtonians.
The handful of remaining Olympia reporters will do their best, but there simply aren’t enough of them to adequately cover state government, as detailed in the report by the Center for Journalism, Media & Democracy in the University of Washington’s communication school.
It found the number of full-time statehouse reporters in Olympia fell to eight last year, down from 19 in 2000.
“This reduction leads to significant challenges, including a lack of institutional knowledge, weakened connections to key political figures and reduced capacity for investigative and in-depth reporting, especially into the influence of increasingly powerful interest groups and lobbyists,” the report said. “Growingly, coverage is concentrated in urban centers, leaving rural areas underserved and raising concerns about the press’s ability to reflect diverse regional perspectives.”
The current statehouse press corps is now mostly newcomers, with a median of only two years of experience, the report found.
At the same time, there’s a critical need for more reporting to inform the public of what’s happening in state government.
The report notes that statehouse reporters must contend with a flood of activity (1,768 bills were introduced in 2023 alone) and hordes trying to influence outcomes, including 1,059 lobbyists, 147 lawmakers and “numerous PR professionals” as of 2023.
It puts a positive spin on a few developments, including the welcome increase in the number of female reporters, and a few digital news startups reporting on state government.
But the overall picture is inescapably bleak. It should be of particular concern to residents and legislators outside big cities. They won’t get much coverage of state issues particularly affecting them until the local news industry stabilizes and regrows newsrooms.
I think the loss of state coverage is probably larger than the UW report found and closer to the two-thirds decline in newspaper employment over the last two decades.
Tallying statehouse reporters is tricky because definitions vary and the press corps is constantly changing.
A 2022 study by Pew Research Center said the number of Washington statehouse reporters fell from 30 to 17 between 2014 and 2022.
Thirty seemed high to Matthew Powers, a UW communication professor who co-authored the report and codirects the Center for Journalism, Media & Democracy.
“It’s a huge decline either way,” he said.
Powers said one impetus for the UW report was declining interest among journalism students in the school’s Olympia internship program, covering the Legislature.
“Over the past five or 10 years it’s been harder to convince students they should uproot their lives and go to Olympia,” he said.
The report also found angst among some statehouse reporters, including concerns about whether there’s still much of an audience for state news stories.
From my perspective, there remains a hearty appetite for state news coverage even if it’s concentrated among the smaller share of the population that still relies on professionally reported local news. Reporting on state news and watchdogging of state government is also a core expectation for millions of Americans who continue subscribing to local and regional newspapers, even if they click more often on stories about fluffier topics.
That appetite is demonstrated by the success of States Newsroom, a national nonprofit covering statehouses, and ventures like The Washington Observer, a digital news site run by veteran political reporter and consultant Paul Queary.
Washington state’s budget is nearly $40 billion this year, which is the equivalent of $5,000 from every one of its 8 million residents.
More than a few residents would like to know where that’s going, how much is being wasted and what they’re getting for their money. Good luck to the remaining eight or however many full-time Olympia reporters are left this year.
WaPo layoffs: A new round of layoffs The Washington Post announced Tuesday will spare the newsroom but cut its overall workforce by 4%, affecting under 100 people, The New York Times reports.
The newsroom was cut in 2023 and more recently saw departures after internal conflict over editorial and management choices under owner Jeff Bezos. That includes the resignation last week of cartoonist Ann Telnaes, after a cartoon skewering billionaires making offerings to President-elect Donald Trump was rejected, with the editorial page editor saying it was too repetitive.
Google starts paying for news, in Canada: Google paid $100 million Canadian to compensate publishers for the value of news used by its platforms, as expected and required by a 2023 law forcing tech giants profiting from news content to pay up or face regulation. The payment shows that this carrot-and-stick policy approach, tested in Australia and proposed in the U.S. Congress, works to level the playing field between tech giants and small publishers that don’t otherwise have leverage to secure fair compensation.
Google must pay $100 million a year, rising with inflation. Funds will be distributed based on the number of journalists employed by professional news organizations. Public broadcaster CBC said it will use the compensation to add up to 25 journalists in more than a dozen communities, particularly in Western Canada, The Canadian Press reports.
This is excerpted from the free, weekly Voices for a Free Press newsletter. Sign up to receive it at the Save the Free Press website, st.news/SavetheFreePress. Seattle Times’ Brier Dudley is the editor of the Free Press Initiative, which aims to inform the public about issues facing newspapers, local news coverage, and a free press. You can learn more about the Free Press Initiative, or sign up for a newsletter, at https://company.seattletimes.com/save-the-free-press/.
