Big Maine papers eliminate bureaus in capitals, but rural papers have own statehouse reporter

The Blethen Maine Newspapers, which are for sale, are some of the latest to cut back on their capital bureaus, in Washington and the state capital of Augusta. That means the state's largest paper, the Portland Press Herald, has no reporter in the statehouse, an hour away. But a couple of small dailies and five weeklies in Maine do. And some of those weeklies are feeding stories to the Press Herald!

When the Portland paper closed its bureaus in the capitals, as well as those in Bath and Biddeford, as part of cutting 12 of its 100 jobs in news, Editor Jeannine Guttman told readers that it would "get reporting help from our sister newspaper in Augusta," assign a Portland reporter to cover the state's "part-time legislature" and cover the state's four-person Washington delegation from Portland.

Jonathan Kaplan, who lost his Washington job after having it for only seven months, wrote in The Washington Post this week that the demise of regional reporters in Washington amounts to an incumbent-protection program, because readers won't know Sens. Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe and the two House members are doing. "They'll probably never learn that, at a press conference in May, just minutes before a vote on a massive farm bill, Collins praised a provision in the measure to close the so-called Enron loophole. She then headed straight to the Senate floor and voted against the bill. We regional reporters put readers in rooms like that and give them a voice. But we're disappearing fast, and it's not clear who can pick up the slack."

But in the state capital, Maine readers have a full-time watchdog in the person of Victoria Wallack's Statehouse News Service, funded by the daily Brunswick Times Record and the Journal-Tribune of Bitteford, both owned by Pemnnsylvania-based Sample Newspapers, and six weeklies -- including the venerable Ellsworth American and Mount Desert Islander, whose publisher, Alan Baker, organized the group. Baker told us in an interview that when he was growing up, "Daily newspapers covered the statehouse like a blanket. When I moved back here was amazed at how bad the coverage was."

But Baker and his buddies are interested in public service beyond their own readership. Some of them send stories to the Press Herald, which publishes them in "Maine Reports" on Sundays, with byline credits and links to their Web sites. Seems like such rural-metro cooperation could do a lot of good in other states. Go for it!

UPDATE, Sept. 12: Not all the regional coverage news is bad. The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette recently added a part-time reporter, Jane Fullerton, to its Washington bureau.