SPRINGFIELD, IL — Fresh off of his successful run for the Illinois governor’s office, Bruce Rauner took a victory lap of sorts in the state capital last week. The governor-elect made the rounds with state lawmakers and, at one point mid-morning, stepped in front of a scrum of reporters to take a few questions.
He must have spotted some familiar faces. Like Rauner, a throng of journalists had made the 200-mile trip from Chicago to Springfield to cover the fall veto session. On this day, the size of the visiting press contingent roughly equaled that of statehouse regulars.
That is an increasingly typical scenario. In July, when the Pew Research Journalism Project released a big report on America’s shifting statehouse press corps, researchers found that less than half the statehouse reporters in the country are assigned to the capital on a full-time basis. The ratio is about the same in Illinois, which, like many other states, has seen a decline in full-time statehouse positions, marked by sharp cuts in newspaper staffing alongside a rise in nontraditional news sources.
As for how these changes in the quantity and distribution of reporters are connected to the quality of coverage—well, that can be more complicated than you might think. Spend a couple of days observing the work of reporters at the statehouse while it’s in session, as I did last week, and the picture you see, as reporters hustle to monitor the chambers, committee meetings, press conferences, even court developments, hardly screams “Capitol press corpse.” Veteran journalists here express confidence in the media’s ability to continue getting the job done. Reporters at the capital, those who make the trek from Chicago and elsewhere, and even student journalists all have roles to play. There’s always more that might be done, but if important stories are being neglected, it’ll take more than a simple tally of reporting positions to spot them.
At the same time, the experience highlighted the continuing value of what might be called “slack in the system”—time to report when not on deadline, and enough bodies regularly at the statehouse to keep everyone on their toes.
A ‘core of full-timers,’ and new players on the beat
Ray Long has been reporting for the Chicago Tribune from the Capitol since 1998, so he’s seen the decline in newspaper staffing firsthand. Just since 2009, according to Pew, full-time newspaper spots have declined from 12 to five.
But Long, who is also president of the Illinois Legislative Correspondents Association, isn’t especially worried about the state of statehouse coverage. “There’s a core of full-timers here who know their way around the block and can handle the beat,” he says.
Long’s office is tucked in a far corner of the press room in the basement of the Capitol building. When the legislature is in session, he shares the space with Monique Garcia, who normally covers the state government out of the Tribune’s main office in Chicago. It’s a smart strategy, he believes, given that a significant amount of state businesses is conducted in the Chicago area. “There’s a value in people who come and go,” Long says. “They get to go back home and touch base with what’s happening locally.”
Each spring, Long is also joined by a graduate student from the Public Affairs Reporting program at the University of Illinois in Springfield. The student reporters learn the ropes quickly and sometimes break news on their own, Long says. He recalls one such story, highlighting how the state Senate, which had voted to ban smoking in public places, was still allowing smoking in its chamber. “This amplifies why you need to have new people coming in—it energizes the press corps,” he says.
The students are just one part of the “filling-the-gap” effort to monitor state government in Springfield. Other contributions come from places like the re-energized Better Government Association; online subscription services like BlueRoomStream.com, which streams video of legislative sessions and Capitol press conferences; and digital-native news organizations like Progress Illinois and Reboot Illinois. Often, these efforts have connections to legacy newsrooms. Charlie Wheeler, who directs the university program, is the former statehouse bureau chief for the Chicago Sun-Times. Matt Dietrich, who leads Reboot Illinois, is the former editorial page editor of The State Journal-Register in Springfield.
Dietrich points out that most of these efforts—including his own site—are meant to be complements, not replacements, for the traditional press corps. “Reboot Illinois was never designed to be a substitute news service for the kind of day-in-and-day-out statehouse coverage,” he says. “But we do try to be a translator of what this news really means to you.”
Still, he says, they represent good news for the efforts to keep the state government accountable. “There’s a lot to be said for having the quantity of news,” he says. “It’s better when all those lawmakers down there know that there are more people who may be watching what they do.”
At Dietrich’s former paper, the veteran political writer and columnist Bernard Schoenburg remains bullish. “It is still a tremendous press corps here,” he says.
But Schoenburg is also quick to stress the importance of having reporters stationed at the Capitol full-time.
“There’s plenty to cover here, especially if you get into the agencies and workings of the state government,” he says. “As a reporter, I got confident enough to write about things when I was here on days when the legislature was not in session—when I could actually sit and talk to people and see things in perspective and have some time to think. The session time is crazy time.”
Rui Kaneya is CJR’s correspondent for Illinois and Indiana. A former investigations editor at The Chicago Reporter, Kaneya was a recipient of the Investigative Reporters and Editors Minority Fellowship and the Robert R. McCormick Tribune Minority Fellowship in Urban Journalism. He has received numerous journalism awards, among them the Watchdog Award for Excellence in Public Interest Reporting from the Society of Professional Journalists and the National Association of Black Journalists’ Salute to Excellence National Media Award. Follow him on Twitter @ruikaneya.