Virtual panel: Pandemic, dwindling number of veteran reporters make it harder to cover statehouse issues

The number of statehouse reporters increased in most states from 2014 to 2022, but mainly because of nonprofit news organizations and their funders, who may not last. (Pew Research Center map; click the image to enlarge it.)

"Full time statehouse reporters are now a luxury for many news organizations," Nick Karpinski reports for the Gateway Journalism Review. Part-time journalists from nonprofit newsrooms have increasingly stepped up to plug some of the coverage gaps—their ranks have nearly quadrupled since 2014, according to a recent Pew Research Center study—but much has still been lost, said a panel of journalists during a May 4 virtual discussion panel, "The State of Statehouse Reporting."

Panelists agreed that widespread layoffs mean there aren't enough veteran journalists to guide younger reporters on the statehouse beat, Karpinski reports. "We have lost so much institutional knowledge," said Hannah Meisel, NPR Illinois' state government and politics editor. "Along with institutional knowledge, we’ve also lost a lot of folks to look up to and model our journalism and our approach to statehouse reporting. If you don’t have model journalists and model editors with institutional knowledge then the guardrails are off."

The pandemic has made statehouse reporting more difficult, too. "In terms of the access at the Capitol, it’s absolutely gotten worse since Covid-19," said Jerry Nowicki, the statehouse bureau chief for Capitol News Illinois. "There’s a lot of locked doors in the senate. Sometimes the elevators are off. You can’t even get up to the areas where lawmakers mingle and where you might learn something that you won’t print but it will help inform the type of stories that you print."

"Meisel agreed and said this lack of access prevents reporters from getting to the meat of legislation in their stories and prevents them from providing substantive information," Karpinski reports.

"There’s an old cliche that says Statehouses are the laboratories of democracies," Meisel said. "If we don’t have adequate coverage of that then we have a government that is unaccountable."

Jason Piscia, director of the Public Affairs Reporting Program at the University of Illinois Springfield, hosted the panel. Also present were Katerina Eva Matsa, associate director of Pew Research and co-author of the recent statehouse study; and Brenden Moore, state politics and government reporter for Lee Enterprises.