Fewer reporters track federal agencies; USDA, Mine Safety and Health Admin. leading examples

Fewer and fewer reporters in Washington cover federal agencies, and two of the biggest examples are the lack of attention to agencies that have a big impact in rural areas: the Department of Agriculture and the Mine Safety and Health Administration, in the Department of Labor. They're leading examples in a very long but good story by Jodi Enda in the June-July issue of American Journalism Review.

"Not one newspaper has a reporter who works in the newsroom of the Department of Agriculture, which, with a staff of 104,000, is one of the government's largest employers. Trade publications and bloggers pick up a bit of the slack but have neither the audience nor the impact of more traditional media outlets," Enda reports. "One Washington-based newspaper reporter covers the Mine Safety and Health Administration, which oversees mines in every state in the country, on anything close to a regular basis."

The lack of ag-department coverage was cited to Enda by Clark Hoyt, "who is completing a three-year stint as the New York Times' public editor in mid-June and was formerly Washington editor for now-defunct Knight Ridder," for which Enda once worked and is now McClatchy Newspapers. Hoyt told her The Des Moines Register "had a powerhouse Washington bureau" that won four Pulitzer Prizes 1968 and 1985 for "stories that grew out of intense coverage of the Agriculture Department."

But today, the coverage is more issue-oriented and less agency-oriented. The Register's only remaining employee in Washington, Philip Brasher, who is often at the cutting edge of mainstream reporting on farm issues, was "not on (the) radar" of Agriculture Department Communications Director Chris Mather when Enda interviewed her. Brasher didn't return Enda's "repeated phone calls," she reports. But just down the hall at the Gannett Co. Inc. bureau on New York Avenue, James R. Carroll of The Courier-Journal in Louisville spoke at length with Enda, and got quoted at length.

"The Courier-Journal historically has had a great interest and desire to cover the coal mining industry and safety issues related to coal mining. That commitment hasn't diminished at all in recent years," Carroll said. "With MSHA, we try to revisit issues that nobody else is covering," such as coal dust in mines that gives miners black-lung disease. (Photo: Carroll lectures at "Carrying the Capitals to Your Community," an Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues seminar on how to cover Washington and state capitals from afar.)

Carroll says there's no substitute for a reporter in Washington, but the only other mainstream reporter who keeps close tabs on MSHA, Ken Ward Jr. of The Charleston Gazette, "doesn't view his location as a disadvantage," Enda reports, quoting him: "If I were in Washington, I might have different and higher-level sources in the agency that I went to lunch with or had drinks with or something, but a sense of perspective outside the Beltway is not necessarily a bad thing."

Ward, left, does something a reporter anywhere can do: "He reads the Federal Register," where agencies publish new regulations and the details surrounding them. "You can read the regulations," Ward says. "You can file FOIA requests. You can do that from afar." And you can cover USDA and its rural-development programs that way, too. And there are big stories beyond the usual items about federal grants to localities. "Rural America continues to suffer," Mather told Enda. "The poverty level is higher, the education level lower. It's suffering because people are leaving those communities. They don't have water treatment systems that work; the schools aren't what they used to be."

Enda concludes, "It could be a great story: Where are these people going? What kind of jobs can they get? Are they putting pressure on the social service system? Who's doing the work they left behind? What's the impact on the cities and suburbs that receive them? What about the schools? Does this migration affect the nation's food supply? Agriculture--like mining--might be a hard sell to readers of large, urban papers whose closest connection with rural America often is a neighborhood farmers market. But it is up to reporters to connect the dots, to explain the impact of rural poverty on the food that makes its way to grocers in Manhattan or Los Angeles, for example, or of mining issues on electricity and climate change nationwide." (Read more)