The destruction of the White House to make room for the expansion of legislative office buildings would certainly make news, if not trigger a constitutional crisis. In the other Washington, not so much. In Olympia, the White House and adjoining Blue House were the nicknames for 1920s-era buildings on the Capitol campus that housed the press corps. They fell into disrepair as the number of reporters registered to cover the Legislature full time fell from 30 in 1987 to only six today. It did not, in fact, make news when they were reduced to parking lots.
Only a half-dozen states still have more than 20 full-time statehouse reporters. The number of full timers declined 6 percent between 2014 and 2022 while the number of reporters working the legislative beat part time spiked by 27 percent. That matters, a Pew Research Center report concludes, because a full-time presence provides “the greatest opportunity to engage with the statehouse and produce stories that go beyond the basic contours of daily news.” This echoes a long-held axiom among journalists — if you don’t go, you won’t know.
“I think we are losing something by not having those feet on the ground here,” says Renee Radcliff Sinclair, a former legislator and journalist who’s watched the press corps shrink over the years. “The White House and the Blue House used to just be bustling with reporters of all kinds, both print and radio.” Those reporters roamed the legislative building following leads, interviewing legislators in the hallways and “sitting on the House and Senate floor writing stories as they’re actually happening. I think there’s a lot of value in that and we’re just not seeing it like we used to.”
Sinclair now works across the street as president and CEO of TVW, the state’s nonprofit public affairs network that carries gavel-to-gavel coverage of all three branches of government. Since its launch in 1995, TVW has evolved into the default pool video provider for news outlets across the state as the journalism business model collapsed. With more than 60 live cameras installed across the Capitol campus, TVW’s role as permanent pool feed became entrenched during the pandemic lockdowns. “As much as I love the transparency we bring to state government, I think we’re partially responsible for newspapers and broadcast entities from around the state keeping their people home,” Sinclair says.
Pool feeds by themselves are not going to save local news coverage. New York state is funding a three-year, $90 million local media tax credit program that allows eligible outlets to receive a 50 percent refundable tax credit against the first $50,000 of an employee’s salary, to a cap of $320,000 per outlet. In California — a state that has lost 68 percent of its journalists and a quarter of all its newspapers over the last 20 years — some legislators want to tax Big Tech to help fund local news outlets. One bill calls for a “link tax” similar to those introduced in Australia and Canada under which large digital platforms pay fees to news outlets to link to stories. Another would impose a usage fee on social media platforms for their redistribution of news content.
The New York tax credit brings with it the risk of dependency on the government journalists are supposed to be watchdogging. As for the link tax, platform companies can avoid it by simply banning links to news sites on users’ feeds. Still, these stopgaps may buy time to develop a more sustainable approach to supporting journalism.
