Changing of the Guard   

Washington's new bureau chiefs are younger, more irreverent and less taken with the trappings of the capital. They're determined to focus less on inside baseball and more on meaningful news. Can they pull it off?

Rep. Patricia Schroeder (D-Colo.), in ketchup-red suit and mustard turtleneck, resembles a Polish sausage, Chicago-style. But at least she doesn't look primed for a wake... Several of the six Supreme Court justices who show [for a presidential speech] look embalmed, except Clarence Thomas, who fidgets and cases the joint with his eyes as if worried that Anita Hill is lurking..."

Dave Barry? Saturday Night Live? Comedy Central?

Guess again.

The descriptions were crafted by the powerful Washington bureau chief of an illustrious mainstream newspaper – James Warren of the Chicago Tribune. They symbolize a new attitude toward Washington reporting, ushered in by a recent wave of youngish bureau chiefs bringing renewed brashness, skepticism and outside perspective to the oh-so-serious News Capital of the World.

Warren took over the Tribune's 20-person bureau last December, arriving from, of all places, the features section. Lobbing an early bash-the-Beltway grenade, he told the Chicago Reader that he didn't intend to hang around the Gridiron Club "prancing around on stage, singing to the president or whatever the fuck they do."

And he has continued to singe the in crowd by writing feisty Sunday columns. Another Warren volley mocked ABC's Cokie Roberts ("a doyenne of Washington's mediatocracy") for emceeing a congressional dinner with lines like "a very dear friend, Bob Michel" and "our dear, dear love, Tip O'Neill."

Though he may be the most out there, Warren is just one of numerous new bureau chiefs to hit Washington in the past couple of years. Empowered by their generational ardor, the energy of a new administration, and the changing nature of journalism everywhere, they are redefining what deserves coverage and how news is presented. They're revisiting everything from beats and topics to the mix of breaking versus explanatory stories to the basic attitude of Washington journalists.

By and large, they're a 40-ish crowd (though still mostly white and male). Warren is 41. The Wall Street Journal's Alan Murray and the Boston Globe's David Shribman are 40. Paul West of Baltimore's Sun is 44; the Chicago Sun-Times' Lynn Sweet, 42; the New York Daily News' Timothy Clifford, 39; and the Houston Post's Kathy Kiely, 38. Andrew Rosenthal, 38, wields near-bureau-chief heft as Washington editor and second-in-command of the New York Times' 70-person bureau.

Murray, Shribman and others have even formed their own lunch-with-a-newsmaker club ("the baby bureau chiefs' group" as Murray calls it) for key journalists "born after the end of the Truman administration."

As Murray points out, they came of age during Watergate, not Camelot. "It means we approach Washington in a different way," he says. "I have a respect and an affection for the institutions in this town. It's not that I come here with an enormous cynicism. But I do think we come with some serious questions."

They also come with some serious criticism.

Rich Oppel, 51, who took over the 45-person Knight-Ridder bureau last August, brought an outsider's eye from his job as editor of the Charlotte Observer.

"There are some things wrong with Washington journalism," Oppel believes. "I sensed those things as a newspaper editor in North Carolina and they were confirmed when I got here. Insularity is the biggest problem. The others are related, like detachment from readers. There's also an arrogance, a clubbishness... You have more reporters wearing tuxedos at dinners celebrating themselves in Washington than in any other square mile in the world."

Warren is just as blunt. "Washington journalism is unlike anything I've ever encountered," he offers. "It's very, very screwed up. There's a whole lot less actual reporting that goes on than I'd have imagined."

Such iconoclastic views don't faze many old Washington hands. Newcomers, in journalism as well as politics, have always vowed to resist Potomac fever, and editors and managers have forever fiddled with the missions of their capital bureaus.

And how much of a difference do bureau chiefs really make anyway? The new administration's initiatives and the natural evolution of news probably drive coverage more than who happens to run the bureaus. And veterans point out that you don't need new leaders to bring about change.

"We don't ever do things exactly the same way for long," says Jack Nelson, 64, Los Angeles Times bureau chief for the past 19 years. "We have new reporters coming in. We have new beats. We talk about new approaches to news. I don't think it requires a changing of the guard to have new approaches to the news."

But the ascension of so many new-thinking bureau chiefs, starting with Deborah Howell's takeover of the Newhouse bureau in 1990, certainly has the potential for altering the nature of Washington journalism. So far, several early trends can be spotted: a less reverential attitude; an increased stress on people stories and explainers at the expense of spot developments; and a broadening of beats and topics beyond the White House-Capitol Hill axis.

Andrew Rosenthal remembers passing out leaflets at age 12 for Robert Kennedy's 1968 presidential bid, and the sadness and cynicism that set in after he was assassinated. From such experiences, he says, his generation brings "different cultural references" and an irreverent skepticism.

"There's a lot less of the notion that we're part of the crowd," Rosenthal says, "that feeling you're supposed to get when you are at the Gridiron and feeling all warm and fuzzy and thinking all the truly important people in the world are in the room and you're one of them."

One result: the saucier styles of Times writers such as Maureen Dowd and Michael Wines.

Bureaus define their missions differently, from the Times' exhaustiveness to the Wall Street Journal's high analysis to the Chicago Sun-Times' laser-like localness to the New York tabloids' jugular competitiveness. But uniformly the new bureau chiefs stress their impatience with insider journalism. Today's mantra: Keep it relevant to readers.

"We're not beat reporters, we're offbeat reporters," explains Kathy Kiely, who heads the four-person Houston Post bureau. "Our primary mission is to serve the interests of the people who aren't a special interest group, the people who can't afford to hire a lobbyist."

Warren calls it "doing things more as if you were a foreign correspondent – detailing the customs and mores of a very odd and unusual place which does affect a lot of people's lives."

What's forcing this new attitude, says Paul West, who runs the 14-person bureau of Baltimore's Sun, "is the same thing driving everything else in daily newspapers. It's recognition we're in very stiff competition for people's time. We really don't write as much inside baseball stuff as we did five years ago."

For example, West says, "a lot of the stories I wrote here as a reporter seven or eight years ago, we just don't write anymore, like the internal warfare at the Democratic National Committee, who's up and who's down, stories that have very little relevance to the lives people live."

At the Boston Globe, the new attitude was deliberately symbolized by having Bureau Chief Shribman and deputy Pamela Constable assume command the same week that Bill Clinton took office.

Shribman, a wunderkind reporter for the New York Times and Wall Street Journal before joining the Globe, wants reporters to pick their shots and stay fresh. He suggests, for instance, that reporters fly commercial rather than press planes, to avoid "sitting around with your pals chewing over the conventional wisdom."

"Our mission is to provide readers who have competing claims on their time the things they need to know and the things they want to know," Shribman says. "In years past, the Globe tried to cover everything. We're not going to write a story every minute."

That sometimes means passing up the routine for the human interest. "Just yesterday," says Constable, 42, "there were three issues going on on the Hill – job retraining, something about polar bears and something else. We couldn't do it all. So we did job retraining in two graphs, and we did a nice feature on polar bears, because we want people to read the paper. We'll wait on job retraining until we've got a little more time and we can humanize it."

Our vision," says Knight-Ridder's Oppel, "is shoot for page one, zig when everybody else zags, get ahead of the news, do enterprise, be analytical, be explanatory. We are not chasing breaking news."

His bureau isn't alone. Many bureaus now stress profiles and issue stories, leaving the daily doings to the wire services. The Globe's Shribman even sends reporters on trips with the president or secretary of state with orders not to write.

"If they write every day, they're not doing the job – to write a story that doesn't have 'yesterday' in it but still is news," Shribman says.

"It's almost impossible to sit on a press plane when everyone else is typing and not to type. It's hard. It's like a chemical impulse. But we want fewer, better stories."

West, of Baltimore's Sun, hopes "to go the wires one better – at least. We do more people and policy,..more stories that try to explain to people why things are happening rather than try to advance the story one click at a time every day."

That's always been a staple of the Wall Street Journal, but Alan Murray expects more.

"We have to move even further in that direction," he says. "That's where you get the added value." Murray especially praises a five-part Journal series on "Beltway Bog: How Washington Frustrates Change."

The Chicago Sun-Times has eliminated its full time White House beat. "In years past, the paper did more traditional national coverage, sometimes duplicating what other outlets were providing," says Lynn Sweet, who has headed the three-reporter bureau since January. Instead, she wants "sophisticated, local coverage that can make a difference."

Some issues, such as Whitewater, demand continuing attention regardless of who the bureau chief is or what the news philosophy might be. "Many people covering Whitewater are doing it to a sizeable degree because they know it's a significant story you can't afford to lose on," explains Richard Cooper, 58, Los Angeles Times deputy bureau chief. "You can't make a conscious decision to pass on it."

In other cases, competitive pressures help dictate a bureau's strategy.

Last October, Timothy Clifford moved from covering the White House for Newsday to heading the five-person New York Daily News bureau. The pressure on him: Get relevant news for New Yorkers and get it before Newsday and the New York Post. So while Clifford has a place for explainers, he still pushes hard for his writers to break news.

"You can have all the explainers you want," he says, "but any day of the week I'd rather have real news."

Once, correspondents routinely spent their days in the Capitol Hill galleries and hearing rooms, churning out earnest reports on subcommittee markups and floor maneuvers. Those days are fading fast.

At Clifford's bureau, for example, there's no longer a reporter assigned full time to Congress. Reporters head to the Hill to cover various themes and issues, but they also spend more time covering agencies and departments, where the new administration has stepped up the action.

Even more sweeping, Knight-Ridder last year reorganized its reporters into teams covering leadership, trends and close-to-home. It has a values, culture and religion beat, and another for families and children. The old Pentagon beat is now the changing military. And there are two "famous-for" beats (based on the notion that "if we can't do everything, damn it, let's be famous for something"), whose definitions change with the news; now, they're health care and urban affairs.

These beats produce an array of stories, such as Mary Otto's profile of poet laureate Rita Dove or Gary Blonston's report on how 76 million baby boomers are losing their "audacious self-celebration" and facing the "insecurity, angst and age-consciousness" of middle age.

As the Houston Post's Kathy Kiely points out, many such stories aren't of classic Washington extraction, but they let reporters make broader use of the capital's voluminous information base on just about everything. For instance, her bureau used an exhibit at a Washington art gallery as a peg for a piece on corporate philanthropy and how museums acquire art objects.

"Washington is not only a political town but in a lot of ways it's a window on what's happening in the rest of the country," Kiely says. "We use our Washington bureau not just to write about Washington but to write about America."

Shribman, to take another example, used a Globe column to not only write about an uncommon topic (a new series of $1 paperback classics that he likes) but also to jab at insider journalism itself.

ýYou can buy [Machiavelli's] 'The Prince'..for less than you spend on the Sunday paper," he wrote, "and come away knowing more about Washington than you'll learn from the entire casts of the 'Capital Gang' and the 'McLaughlin Group'..and, dare I say it, all the faithful correspondents in the Washington bureaus of American newspapers."

As topics change (and as news space gets more precious), more and more of these Washington reports wind up outside the traditional A-section news hole.

Not surprisingly, given that Warren is a former Tempo section editor, many Chicago Tribune Washington bureau offerings appear in the paper's features section, including Warren's Sunday column. The bureau also pitches stories to the weekend Perspective section. One, by Elaine S. Povich, compared the health care bill's elaborate legislative hurdles to the kids' game of Labyrinth, using subheadings such as "Princes, princemakers, and public hearings."

Houston Post bureau offerings often make the feature and business fronts. The Sun-Times bureau provides sports section stories, such as one on the search for a new major league baseball commissioner. Paul West even invited a new editor of the Sun's feature section to visit the Washington bureau and prospect for copy.

Few of their peers want to criticize other bureau chiefs, but the recent innovations and unorthodox moves do raise some eyebrows in private. Many wonder, for example, whether Warren can sustain his gunslinging style. Others question whether big, cautious papers and chains will, in the long run, stand for the less traditional coverage, or even whether coverage will change all that much.

Stephen Hess, a Brookings Institution senior fellow and author of "The Washington Reporters," has studied journalism in the capital for years. While he sees the new breed of bureau chiefs coming in largely because of "headquarters being irritated with Washington-itis," Hess doubts that coverage will be revolutionized.

"My hunch is that the outsiders will get here..saying we'll shake things up and do things differently, and they'll find out there's probably been a pretty good reason to have one person covering Congress and one at the White House. No matter what they tell you, it will probably settle down and not be uniquely different after a year or two."

In addition, the ongoing changes raise substantive questions: Will they trivialize Washington news and undercut needed watchdog reporting? Will they be compromised by the current demand for shorter stories? Will editors actually find space for the trend stories and explainers, and live with fewer spot pieces?

Every bureau chief speaks glowingly (on the record) about the fine editors back home. But several reveal concerns about whether papers are fully committed to new-style coverage.

"As much as editors say they want something different, they're struggling with this too – asking, 'Why didn't you have that story?' and that type of thing," says the Houston Post's Kathy Kiely.

One heartland editor confided that, while he admired his paper's bureau for trying to report the larger picture, he often found the copy too long and off-the-news to crack a tight paper.

Similar debates stew within the bureaus themselves. Staff members, no less brash and pushy than their bureau chiefs, sometimes bridle at the new directions.

"There have been some reporters who were more event-oriented that have moved on to other places," says Oppel, whose bureau has lost several national reporters in the past two years. "I think that's good for them and good for us."

To handle these stresses and others, the new bureau chiefs generally talk about a more collegial management style. Several described how they try to involve all editors and writers in strategic decisions. They also emphasize that reporters have changed too.

"The people covering Washington for us tend to not be the around-the-clock, hard-drinking, schmoozing, insider, good-old-boy type of journalist that you could still see a few years ago," says the Boston Globe's Pamela Constable. "My typical reporter is 35, married with two small kids, someone who cares very much about journalism but doesn't go out card playing and partying at night to get to know politicians."

Shribman says that he makes a point to get home for a family dinner every night. Having said that, though, he has second thoughts and says he doesn't mean to "send a signal" that his reporters should ease up.

Few bureaus are easing up. In fact, Timothy Clifford of the New York Daily News stresses a vital bottom line: All the current changes, from an activist administration to new journalistic blood, add up to regained prominence for Washington news. "We're on the front pages of the New York tabloids more than anytime since Iran-contra, or maybe earlier," Clifford says.

"We're in desperate and deep competition," he adds, "and Washington has to compete too. But we have to compete in ways we can win. We have to give our readers things they can't get anywhere else."