Metro papers' cutbacks hurt coverage of Congress; smaller news outlets need to pick up the slack

As more metropolitan newspapers cut back on regional reporting, including Washington bureau reporters, smaller news outlets must bear more of the burden for holding elected officials accountable -- especially those who work away from home, in state capitals or Washington.

"Washington bureaus are hemorrhaging reporters or closing altogether," Bill Walsh, left, said in accepting the Robin Goldstein Award for Washington Regional Reporting from the National Press Club last week. Walsh is one of the latest examples; he left the New Orleans Times-Picayune in May to become a strategic adviser at AARP. "Given the state of the newspaper industry, I suspect that had I not left voluntarily I wouldn't have had a choice eventually," Walsh said. "The slot I left hasn't been filled."

Walsh's remarks were posted on the Web site of American Journalism Review. All are worth reading; here are some: "The number of bloggers commenting on the news out of Washington has exploded. The number of reporters actually digging up the news has dwindled. Washington bureaus are hemorrhaging reporters or closing altogether. In tight times, papers see their Washington operations as luxuries. That's misguided. The result is that members of Congress, except for the leaders, are getting less scrutiny than ever. Even before I left, I was so busy covering the daily stories that I had little time to do what I was sent here to do: Dig into what local members of Congress were up to, find out who was influencing them and figure out if they were truly representing the folks back home."

That erodes a fundamental element of democracy, Walsh said: "I see us, fundamentally, as explainers cutting through the complexities of Washington and telling our readers what it means to them. Lacking that, the public grows ever more cynical and detached from an increasingly complicated government they seem to understand less and less. At a time when members of Congress have gotten remarkably sophisticated at manipulating their images, there are fewer reporters around cutting through the spin, putting it in context, explaining it. . . . If I don't report that a senator has introduced legislation to curry favor with an influential constituent, or that FEMA has decided not to give hurricane assistance to college students, or that Democrats are using racially tinged comments to demean a rising star in the Republican Party, who happens to be non-white, it's as if those things never happened." (Read more)

Technology and Web sites of nonpartisan, non-profit groups offer opportunities for local reporters to do that kind of reporting. One example is the Sunlight Foundation, which says it was founded in 2006 to harness "the revolutionary power of the Internet to make information about Congress and the federal government more meaningfully accessible to citizens." Sunlight does its own research and creates databases and on subjects such as congressional earmarks, member schedules and hiring of spouses. It has begun a "comprehensive, completely indexed and cross-referenced depository of federal documents." For a list of its projects, click here.