A Shrinking Feeling in Washington   

At Ottaway News Service in Washington, D.C., the focus these days isn't just on writing for the 19 papers the regional news bureau services coast to coast — it's also on the writing on the wall.

Ottaway, a division of Dow Jones, is considering a plan that could reduce the Washington bureau to half its current size. By the end of the year, the 10 reporters and editors who file local news daily are expected to learn just how many of them still have jobs.

Ottaway is not alone. A number of news organizations have reassessed their commitments to coverage from Washington.

"Nothing has been decided here definitely. It's still under review," says Ottaway bureau news editor Winston Wood, who has worked for Ottaway papers since 1984. "We have good support from top executives for the company. But there are others who think more in terms of the finances. They view having a Washington presence as an expense and something to be trimmed."

At Thomson Newspapers, the axe has already fallen. The company sold off some 40 of its 104 papers in North America during the last several years, and a new corporate edict requires the remaining papers to pay according to a circulation-based formula for hometown coverage from Washington.

In early January, Thomson eliminated seven of its 14 Washington jobs, letting go veteran bureau chief Bill Sternberg as well as the news editor, three of seven correspondents, the photo editor and the office manager.

"I'm very proud of the work that the people in this bureau did during my tenure as bureau chief," says Sternberg, who worked for Thomson from 1981 to 1984, then left and returned in 1989 as news editor. He had been Thomson's Washington bureau chief since 1991.

"We increased the amount of enterprise and investigative reporting that the bureau did with some award-winning projects, added photographic and graphic services and put in a new computer system," he says. "It's disappointing to me to invest six years of my career building the bureau and see it downsized so drastically."

"This was not a cost-cutting effort," says Jim Smith, senior vice president of operations for Thomson Newspapers in Stamford, Connecticut, adding that the changes were made to reflect the company's decentralized approach to management as well as the restructuring of the overall organization. "We have fewer papers operating in fewer states and fewer congressional delegations to cover." Shifting more management decisions to individual papers, he adds, means that "local editors are in the position to understand the needs of their readers."

There's no consensus about whether what happened at Thomson and what could happen at Ottaway is a harbinger of the future for other Washington regional bureaus.

Alan Schlein, who has operated the Schlein News Bureau in Washington for 15 years, says that over the years many newspaper chains have shifted the costs of Washington regional bureaus from corporate budgets to individual papers.

"What I think we're witnessing is not any decrease in the interest in regional coverage, but rather the archenemy number one — monetary pressure," says Leland Schwartz, editor of States News Service, which supplies local news to several hundred papers and is a contributing partner of the New York Times News Service.

It was less than a year ago that States experienced one of the worst customer droughts in its almost 25-year history. Between the summers of 1995 and 1996, Schwartz says, "we lost hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of regional coverage." But the good news, he adds, is that "since then we've gotten it all back. We are really feeling the pendulum swinging back."

One paper that recently returned to States' fold is the Chicago Tribune, and it returned with new demands that could indicate a new role for Washington bureaus. "The editors asked us to think of this new assignment with them in two ways," Schwartz says. "First and always to contribute to the paper, but second, and as important, to contribute local and regional news to the electronic Tribune."

It was the first time, Schwartz says, that States has received such a dual assignment. "If that is any signal of things to come," he says, "we're thrilled to death."

At the Freedom Forum, the spring class of Paul Miller Reporting Fellows, a year-long program that trains regional reporters in D.C., had 15 people, compared with 19 in the previous group. Cheryl Arvidson, director of programs at the Freedom Forum, says the new class meets the goal of 15 to 20 people and doesn't augur any trend. In fact, she recalls that some of the fellowship's larger classes were in the early 1990s, "when you couldn't find a newspaper job to save your soul."

Even so, regional reporters these days seem to be more keenly aware that the perception and the function of regional bureaus may be changing, especially as more federal programs shift back to state capitals.

"There is a continuing concern that [coverage of] government and politics keeps getting downgraded," says Ellyn Ferguson, Midwest reporter for Gannett News Service and president of the Regional Reporters Association. "We keep encountering editors at our papers who have never done government reporting and consider it boring.

"That makes it even more incumbent on us to coordinate with them and to explain how government affects their lives," Ferguson adds. "And maybe that's the big challenge."