Fewer metropolitan reporters follow statewide candidates, giving opportunity to rural journalists

Walter Shapiro of Politics Daily says he sees fewer and fewer reporters on the campaign trail as he covers races for governor and the U.S. Senate, especially in rural areas. His current examples are Kentucky, South Carolina and Massachusetts, but we expect it applies in most states. Sounds like there are more opportunities for rural reporters to break statewide and even national news.

"What we are witnessing in this election cycle is the slow death of traditional statewide campaign journalism," Shapiro writes. "Traveling with candidates (particularly in states like South Carolina and Kentucky where personal campaigning matters) gives you a sense of nuance about who they are as people and politicians. . . . Newspapers like the Louisville Courier-Journal and The State, South Carolina's largest paper, have dramatically de-emphasized in-depth candidate coverage because they are too short-handed to spare the reporters." In Massachsetts's special election early this year, almost all the coverage was from the Boston area, Shapiro reports.

He concludes, "At a time when Americans are obsessed with politics, it is both sad and strange that the great narratives of on-the-road campaign journalism have become as imperiled as midlist novelists and itinerant poets. Only a memorable political year like 2010 can produce one-of-a-kind statewide candidates like Nikki Haley, who is overwhelmingly favored to win the June 22 [South Carolina gubernatorial] runoff, and [Kentucky Republican Senate nominee] Rand Paul. Too bad that they are not big enough stories to lift the leading South Carolina and Kentucky newspapers out of their economically determined decline toward irrelevance." (Read more)