Who’s got the beat?   

More news organizations are staffing security-related departments in Washington, D.C., since September 11. But at other critically important agencies, the ranks of regular beat reporters are shrinking.

At most newspapers in America, announcements from the U.S. Department of Agriculture in Washington find their way onto the business pages or, more frequently, into the trash bin.

But when the monthly corn and soybean crop estimates were released this August, the Des Moines Register led the paper with a story reporting that overnight the value of Iowa crops had soared by $1.6 billion. An island of green in a sea of drought, Iowa fields were among the few that had remained fertile in what was expected to be the nation's smallest harvest in six years. It was the crop report of the decade, and a good example of why the Des Moines Register keeps a full-time Washington correspondent devoted to the Department of Agriculture.

Not only was it a huge story for Iowans, it was one that would be much better handled by a specialist with a regional orientation than by a wire service report.

This summer's forest fires burning across Colorado in historic proportions pose a painful illustration of what can happen when reporters don't cover Washington bureaucracies. "A lot of those fires are a result of the fact that the U.S. Forest Service is spending less money to thin out the forests," says William Dean Singleton, CEO of MediaNews Group, one of the nation's largest newspaper companies, and publisher of the Denver Post and Salt Lake Tribune. "Without thinning, we were basically just making logs for fires. Holy cow, where were we five or six years ago when the Forest Service budget was cut? Why weren't we watching that carefully?"

Currently there are no news organizations that assign a full-time reporter to the Department of the Interior. There are also no full-time beat reporters at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the Department of Veterans Affairs and the Social Security Administration--where three news organizations have dropped coverage since our last survey. There have been steep declines in coverage of the Labor Department and the U.S. Supreme Court since the Project on the State of the American Newspaper last surveyed Washington beat coverage in May 2001. Where there had been four full-time reporters devoted to Labor last year, now there is one. Thirteen reporters had been devoted full time to the high court last year; now there are nine. Where there had been six reporters devoted to the IRS three years ago, now there are three.

This is not to say that there is a shortage of Washington correspondents. About 1,400 reporters have coveted White House press cards. More than 2,000 daily print journalists carry credentials to cover Congress. But the vast majority of these reporters seldom write stories about the federal regulatory agencies or departments where much of the government's business is transacted.

To be sure, some bureau chiefs see probing departments and regulatory bodies as a better use of resources than running with the pack at the White House. St. Louis Post-Dispatch Bureau Chief Jon Sawyer figures that staffing the White House, including trips with the president, costs about $100,000 a year. "And that's only covering some of the trips. Do them all and it's $250,000. And if you didn't do trips, you're a stenographer, sitting in the White House press room," he says. So Sawyer and his editors decided that they could get more for the buck by digging into subjects of interest in St. Louis, home to several defense contractors and the agricultural-products giant Monsanto. Thus, one of the Post-Dispatch's five bureau reporters spends most of his time developing investigative stories on the defense industry; another was one of the first in the nation to identify genetically altered food as an issue.

With 12 reporters, Newsday's Washington bureau has more than twice the firepower of the Post-Dispatch, but it does less scrutinizing of government departments. "We don't do much agency reporting," says Newsday Bureau Chief Timothy M. Phelps. "If we had only five or six reporters, it would be easier--you make it more an enterprise bureau. But with 12 reporters, we cover the big daily story out of Washington." If Newsday is planning to play a Washington story on page one, or anywhere in the first eight pages, Phelps wants it to be staff written, particularly if the subject is the September 11 aftermath or the stock market meltdown--both local stories for the Long Island-based tabloid.

Understandably, coverage of the Pentagon, the Federal Aviation Administration and the Justice Department has increased dramatically since September 11--the Washington Post, for instance, had four reporters at the Pentagon alone for much of the year. And our surveys have shown that over the go-go-economy-dominated last decade, papers have thrown more staff at covering the Federal Reserve Board, Securities and Exchange Commission and U.S. Treasury, although this added attention did little to uncover the accounting scandals and inflated stock values revealed in recent months.

In our last survey of Washington beats (see "Where Are the Watchdogs?" July/August 2001), Washington bureau chiefs explained why they weren't assigning more reporters to cover departments and agencies full time. Among their reasons: lack of resources; a desire for more meaningful, readable trend or feature stories as opposed to incremental Washington process stories; an emphasis on locally oriented copy; a belief that the wire services can do the "must" daily news, leaving others to do more innovative, enterprising stories.

Understandable sentiments, no doubt. But what are the ramifications? What harm stems from the fact that many newspapers have walked away from Washington beats?

Simply put, there are large gaps in scrutiny, which means that there is an absence of informed, meaningful debate on many issues. Stories about the way government policies affect working people and the poor, for example, have become harder to find as newspapers have phased out coverage of entities such as the Labor Department.

Critics say the exodus from the Labor Department means that there is little coverage of the working class struggling in low-wage jobs, working irregular hours, often under illegal conditions. "These are hidden stories that, if they were told, would really change public opinion in this country," says Karen Nussbaum, assistant to the president of the AFL-CIO. "There's a thirst for those stories," she says, citing the surprise popularity of bestseller "Nickel and Dimed," Barbara Ehrenreich's first-person account of trying to eat and pay the rent while working in minimum wage jobs.

"Everything gets missed," says Robert Weissman, codirector of Essential Action, a Washington-based corporate accountability group that monitors the Labor Department. "The regulatory issues, which are constant; the legislative fights, which have been one-sided for the last 20 years; and, most importantly, the reality of worker conditions on the job, which is a story that is almost completely neglected in comparison to the hourly updates of the status of the Dow on broadcast news."

President Bush's proposal to privatize a portion of Social Security pension funds has been covered heavily, but often as an inside-Washington political battle. Without the knowledge and perspective that come from having beat reporters stationed at the Social Security Administration, coverage often lacks insight and clarity, or sometimes is just plain wrong.

The Wall Street Journal's John McKinnon, who worked full time for nine months last year reporting on the Bush administration's commission on pension reform, produced coverage that stood far above that of his part-time competitors. "McKinnon got to the point where the commission would meet and he already had the story of what would happen the day before," says Hans Riemer, senior policy adviser for Campaign for America's Future, an activist organization opposed to pension privatization.

People on the other side of the issue also cite the need for media expertise, and point to the consequences of its absence. Matt Moore, an analyst with the Dallas-based National Center for Policy Analysis, says that while his pro-privatization group forecasts that the Social Security Administration is projected to run out of funds in 2041, there has been little coverage of projections that Medicare will go broke even sooner.

Let's check out Washington's Fourth Estate to see what the decreasing emphasis on federal beats means on a daily basis as reporters try to figure out how to best cover the nation's capital. While the major bureaus churn out impressive volumes of excellent copy, numbers don't always make the difference: As you'll see, some of the most piercing, imaginative coverage comes from journalists toiling for news organizations, without massive rosters and clout, that place a premium on in-depth reporting. And the old-style commitment to beats continues to pay major dividends.

On the night of December 12, 2000, the long, narrow press office at the U.S. Supreme Court was as crowded as a rush-hour subway car. Reporters jostled for space as they waited to see how the court would rule on Bush vs. Gore, the case that would decide who would be the next president of the United States. At the stroke of 10, reporters filed through the press office, where they were handed newly printed decisions.

Unlike most of the court's rulings, there was no summary of what the court had decided and no clue as to who had written the majority opinion. Pandemonium ensued. Millions of people around the globe watched as television reporters desperately flipped through the papers, reading passages aloud under the high-intensity TV lights as they struggled to divine what the court had done and who would be heading for the White House. Nina Totenberg, the National Public Radio legal affairs correspondent, went on air and read aloud a portion of the decision that indicated a 7-2 vote to send the case back to a lower court before she found the correct information.

Linda Greenhouse, the New York Times reporter who won a 1998 Pulitzer for her Supreme Court beat coverage, dashed outside and hailed a cab, rushing to the Times' Washington bureau. The bureau leadership was waiting, gathered around a speakerphone to New York.

"It's 5 to 4. It's over. Bush wins," Greenhouse barked.

"You have 10 minutes to write," then-Executive Editor Joseph Lelyveld barked back.

Around 11 p.m. the New York Times' was among the first Web sites to post the news that George W. Bush was the next president. Greenhouse could deliver the news quickly and correctly because she knew how to read court documents. Only by a careful reading of the dissenting opinion could she determine that the vote had been 5-4, split largely along partisan lines.

That night clearly illustrated the value of full-time beat reporting. But Greenhouse, 55, cites what to her is far more compelling evidence. "Anybody can do the big, obvious case of the president being picked by the Supreme Court. It's all the other less obvious cases that aren't being covered, not being reported with the texture and context of the court, that are being missed."

For instance, on May 28, the justices announced a 5-4 decision in a seemingly arcane case involving the Charleston, South Carolina, port. The high court ruled that the state-owned port didn't have to answer to a federal maritime authority when it denied a berth to a cruise line--a ruling without earth-shaking impact, but another assertion of state sovereignty over the federal government. Greenhouse recognized the decision as the year's most important example of the Rehnquist court's ongoing revolution to elevate its own power to trump Congress, while significantly expanding the 11th Amendment, which grants states immunity from private lawsuits. The New York Times led the paper with her story the next day.

Reporter Lyle Denniston squeezed in two paragraphs about the ruling at the end of a complex story about another case in the Boston Globe. Most newspapers ignored the decision.

If a Supreme Court ruling falls in a forest and no one hears it, does it establish a legal precedent? Yes--but few Americans know it.

"Most of the country is in a complete muddle over what happens in the Supreme Court," says Greenhouse, a tall Radcliffe graduate with sensible shoes, big glasses and a master's in law from Yale. Greenhouse, who has covered the court since 1978, has become such a respected Supreme Court scholar that she is invited to address constitutional law conferences. Her articles are published in law reviews.

Greenhouse says her job is "to grab the reader by the lapels and say, 'This is important!' The only way to know the importance of the story is to be inside the discourse." Because of her careful, diligent reporting, readers of the New York Times are among the few people in the country aware of the Rehnquist court's relentless march toward a new federalism--a trend first identified by Greenhouse in the mid-1990s. The decisions affect millions of state employees who are now, thanks to the series of court decisions, barred from suing their employers over age discrimination, disability or other grounds normally offered to workers.

Regular beat reporters began disappearing at the Supreme Court almost a decade ago, when the television networks pulled out. Then it was the newspaper company bureaus like Knight Ridder and Scripps Howard. And last year when Newsday's Gaylord Shaw and the Baltimore Sun's Lyle Denniston took buyouts, the papers--among the last to have full-time Supreme Court coverage--didn't fill the positions. Denniston immediately began stringing for the Boston Globe.

"The Supreme Court offers a steady diet of news. I cannot conceive of not staffing it," says Los Angeles Times Bureau Chief Doyle McManus. "That's just nuts. David Savage, who covers the court for us, probably had as many bylines in the paper as anybody during the Gore and Bush recount battle--because he was writing about legal issues."

Greenhouse, with 24 years on the beat, and Denniston, with 43, have established the gold standard for consistent, knowledgeable Supreme Court reporting. "You can't wing it," says Denniston, a one-time AJR columnist. "You have to do research, probably more than any other beat. You can't call up a lawyer and say, 'Explain the case to me in five minutes.' " During the summer, when the court is in recess, Denniston and Greenhouse spend their time researching pending cases. Greenhouse keeps a handwritten notebook in which she logs each and every one of the some 2,000 cases most likely to be taken up by the court.

Denniston attributes the decline of Supreme Court coverage to a number of factors: The court takes fewer and fewer cases; many of the nation's most contentious legal issues have been decided; there are few cases with the public appeal or magnitude of Brown vs. Board of Education or Roe vs. Wade. He also blames a shortening public attention span and a dumbing down of the news media. "For whatever the reason, the American media has lost its love affair with substance," he says. "Personality has become more important than substance, color more important than process, celebrity more important than merely interesting."

Greenhouse cites another culprit: "It's the editors," she says. "I had to fight to get time for this beat. When I'm not busy producing for the newspaper, I'm sitting, reading...petitions. Editors can't stand that. An editor abhors a reporter without a line on the daily sked. Especially last year when people got pulled off for 9/11.

"Originally, they used to ask me to pick up the D.C. Circuit Court. I'd say, 'If you want someone to cover D.C. Court, then hire somebody.' The person who had the job before me wouldn't take that position – the result was he was working all the time, writing about the court as well as general law. That way lies madness. You cannot sustain high-quality coverage here and do anything else, in my opinion."

Karin Fischer is literally sitting on the edge of her seat, long legs crossed, one square-toed backless shoe swinging nervously up and down. She shoots up her hand again and again, but Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta calls on other reporters at this special briefing for journalists from two dozen regional newspapers. Every correspondent in the room has asked a question except Fischer, a reporter for MediaNews Group's Daily Mail in Charleston, West Virginia. She is in line to be called on next.

"Alrighty, everybody. Thank you," the DOT press secretary says, signaling that the press conference is over.

Out of her chair in a flash, Fischer surges to the front of the room, where Mineta is already surrounded by reporters. Despite her maneuvering, she fails to wedge in her question, about how new security rules will affect smaller airports such as Charleston's. The transportation secretary turns to walk out of the room. Fischer races out of a different door and tracks Mineta to the elevator. He is shielded by a phalanx of suits. The elevator door opens, he steps in. The door closes.

Shut out.

Much of the Washington press corps consists of lone guns such as Fischer, who must rely on energy and imagination to compete in an environment dominated by big-foot reporters from major news organizations. Fischer's mission is covering home-state issues and the West Virginia congressional delegation. Knowing she is a minnow in the Washington journalism food chain, she goes to great lengths to overcome the obstacles encountered by reporters from small newspapers.

For a year she attended monthly workshops for regional Washington reporters on a National Press Foundation fellowship. "It helped fill my Rolodex, get me access to people I normally wouldn't have," she says. Fischer attends briefings, such as that with Mineta, arranged by the 160-member Regional Reporters Association, because agency chiefs generally don't return her calls.

Fischer, 28, is a diligent, serious reporter, with a sense of the importance of her mission. "I'm the only Washington reporter who covers West Virginia," she says. Because of this status, she gets extraordinary access to her own senators and representatives--powerful Washington insider Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., once telephoned to sing her "Happy Birthday." "If I don't cover our issues," she says, "then no one does." (A Gannett News Service reporter is assigned to cover West Virginia, but also is responsible for North and South Carolina and Virginia, which grab most of his attention.) Fischer closely monitors several issues of great interest in the hardscrabble Mountain State: veterans' affairs, energy, services for the elderly. In a typical week, she files six or seven stories, if not more.

After the DOT briefing, Fischer returns to file a story at her bureau on the 12th floor of the National Press Building. Fischer deals directly with her editors in West Virginia, usually bypassing Bill McAllister, MediaNews' bureau chief. "We operate like the federal system," says McAllister. "Each reporter reports back to his own papers; I only get involved on stories for which we cooperate."

In 1999, McAllister, now 60, left his job covering federal agencies for the Washington Post to head the new Washington bureau for Dean Singleton's MediaNews Group. The Denver Post, MediaNews' largest paper, had closed its Washington bureau two years earlier; Singleton ordered it reopened. McAllister went down to the basement of the National Press Building, where he found the bureau's old computers and files in a locked storeroom. Now the bureau has eight reporters, including Fischer; McAllister and two others who write for the flagship Post; two California reporters who file for the group's 24 newspapers in that state, including the Oakland Tribune and Los Angeles Daily News; a reporter for the Connecticut Post; and one for Alaska's Fairbanks Daily News-Miner.

McAllister says that Singleton champions covering federal government. Sometimes he's more enthusiastic about the idea than his top lieutenants: Recently, the editors of the Connecticut Post and Massachusetts' Lowell Sun and Berkshire Eagle hatched a plan to cut costs by sharing a single Washington correspondent--an idea that Singleton immediately nixed, declaring that Connecticut and Massachusetts have nothing in common.

Singleton says that Washington coverage has everything to do with local news. "Eighty-six percent of Alaska is owned by the federal government, plus two of the most powerful senators in the Senate are from Alaska," he says. "It's not unusual for Sam Bishop to have two stories out of Washington in one day on the front page of the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner. Our biggest industry up there is the military. Whether or not a base is going to add or subtract people, or even close, is more important in Fairbanks, Alaska, than a school board meeting. It's local news."

The emphasis on local stories does not allow time for penetrating coverage of federal agencies. But McAllister plans to change that. In July Singleton won a court dispute over management of the Salt Lake Tribune. McAllister eagerly anticipates adding four reporters to the bureau by the end of the year, including one to cover Utah and another Massachusetts. The chain's editors have signed off on creating a land issues beat to include the U.S. Forest Service, the Agriculture Department and oil and gas issues at the Department of Energy.

With added troops, McAllister hopes to put into action an idea he had when he was city editor at Norfolk's Virginian-Pilot in the 1970s. "I wanted to make the Norfolk [Washington] reporter a specialist in the Navy, because of all the Navy business in the Norfolk Port. It's taken 30 years, but that's what they are doing now. That's what we want to do with the issue of federal lands. We want to be the paper on federal lands."

Norfolk is a company town and the company is the U.S. Navy, explains Dale Eisman in his office above his garage in Springfield, Virginia, just outside the Washington Beltway. He's in his summer work clothes: shorts, sport shirt, bare feet, and a pair of bifocals dangling from a string around his neck. Since 1994, he has worked the Navy beat for the Virginian-Pilot from his office here, a former storeroom. But Eisman, 51, also visits the Pentagon two or three times a week, patrols Capitol Hill during military appropriations hearings and sometimes drops in on the D.C. Navy Yard.

"The Navy is a local story for us," he says. His last major effort was a 90-inch profile of Admiral Vern Clark, chief of naval operations, the Navy's CEO. It was a story that was of intense interest in the Hampton Roads port communities, the Virginian-Pilot's home base, where 100,000 people work for the military, either on active duty or as civilians, and related contractors employ thousands more.

Earlier this year the destroyer USS Cole was about to go back into service following repairs from the October 2000 terrorist bomb attack in Yemen that killed 17 sailors, many of whom had been based in Norfolk. While continuing to file frequent daily stories, Eisman spent three months researching a story that revealed that, despite the arrests and detention of six conspirators in the attack, none had been prosecuted. Eisman did much of the research in his home office, searching Web sites and talking on the phone with sources at the Naval Criminal Investigative Service. "Once the agents agreed to cooperate, they were helpful, although 95 percent of what they told me was on background," he says. It was a story that probably could not have been written without access won by eight years of source development and expertise.

"It would drive me crazy to be a generalist in a one-person Washington office," he says. "When you're on a beat, you develop a feel for the people, hopefully some expertise, so you know when the B.S. is coming thick and heavy."

Most of Washington's smaller bureaus operate behind plain gray doors that line the monochrome hallways of the National Press Building. Room 1141 is a three-room suite that serves as the home of the two-man Buffalo News bureau, composed of Bureau Chief Douglas Turner, 70, who handles most of the daily news; and Jerry Zremski, 41, who serves as both enterprise reporter and quasi-national correspondent.

Piles of newspapers, federal reports and phone books are scattered across the floor of Turner's office. "If you can find someone who writes a meaner column than I do, call me," he says. Turner often covers the news of the day out of the White House or the Pentagon, although it isn't easy--a question posed to the White House media center by the Buffalo News at 11 a.m. often doesn't rate a call back until 7 p.m. As those events are well covered by wires, I ask, why should a local paper's small bureau cover them anyway?

"Because we're good at it," Turner booms. "You're letting the staff gallop, not keeping them at a canter. Let them out and let the reins go and let them run."

Turner devotes much of his time to covering prominent New York Democratic Sens. Hillary Clinton and Charles E. Schumer, who often make national and local news at the same time. Access to the local delegation is almost never a problem for a hometown paper. "Chuck Schumer is highly organized, and when we call over to his office, we get a call back in about 25 seconds," says Turner.

"You're kidding, right?" I ask.

"Not at all. I'll show you." He dials the senator's number by memory, speaks with a receptionist and leaves a message.

I look at the second hand of my watch and wait. Sure enough--not in 25 seconds, but 85--the phone rings and it's Schumer's press aide. Probably not a surprise, given the senator's publicity-mad reputation--it's sometimes said that the most dangerous place to be in Washington is between Schumer and a television camera.

In the adjacent office, Zremski says he has worked with his editors in Buffalo to redefine his beat to focus on a handful of agencies instead of his previous all-enterprise assignment. "The problem I found with being strictly enterprise was that I was an utterly free agent," he says. "The basics of reporting--mining and developing sources--can get lost. I'm a firm believer that big stories come out of the small stories."

For some time, Zremski had wanted to do a story that would illuminate the issue of global warming for Buffalo. He figured a good local angle would be to trace what is happening to Lake Erie as a result of the forecasted climate change. "I've been noticing odd reports that little crustaceans in Lake Erie are being killed. They're very hardy crustaceans; they serve as food supply for fish. Little critters in the water, OK? I haven't researched this really well. But I hear that scientists think that global warming might be the reason, because the lake hasn't been freezing the last couple of years."

Zremski, a good sport, agreed to allow me to tail him off and on for the next two months to see how a regional Washington reporter spends his time, subject to the pushes and pulls of breaking news and local issues, all the while trying to put together a relatively simple enterprise story that he estimated would take two days.

On June 17, his editors called to send him to Nashville, Tennessee, where suspected killer James Kopp was thought to have purchased a gun used to shoot an abortion doctor in upstate New York. Instead of researching global warming, Zremski prepared for the trip and filed a 12-inch story about a report on playground safety that mentioned some Buffalo sites.

Zremski flew to Tennessee the following Monday, spent two nights there, returned to Washington, then shuttled up to New York City to cover the Adelphia Communications Corp. bankruptcy hearing--it has an important local angle, as Adelphia employs 1,700 people in Buffalo and company founder John J. Rigas is an owner of the Buffalo Sabres hockey team.

"Next week should be better," Zremski promised. "I really haven't been a Washington correspondent for the last two weeks."

But next week wasn't better. Nor the next. On July 11, he planned to head to Capitol Hill for a hearing where he hoped to begin identifying sources for the global warming story. But he was sidetracked again when he picked up the morning papers and read that President Bush had received a multimillion-dollar insider loan from a company when he was a director. "This is what led to the bankruptcy of Adelphia," figured Zremski. Plus, Schumer provided a local angle by proposing an amendment to a corporate governance bill to prohibit such loans in the future. "So I decided to shift gears entirely to do a relatively quick hit on this corporate practice, how prevalent it is, and so I'm going to write it today."

How about next week?

"I'm almost certain I'm doing this long-promised global warming story."

That didn't happen. On July 16, Zremski laughed when asked for an update on the global warming story. "I'm back to the Adelphia story. I hate to say it, but this is fairly typical. I am used as more of a national correspondent these days than as a Washington correspondent."

On August 8, the Buffalo News at last published Jerry Zremski's global warming story, which sketched a portrait of Buffalo in the year 2050. Citing several scientists' projections, Zremski wrote that upstate New York will likely warm to a climate similar to that of western Maryland. Lake Erie will shrink into a shallower, more polluted waterway, creating shores of new sandy beaches but driving out the shipping business. The story prompted more reaction than Zremski has ever received on an individual piece.

To his gathered Boston Globe Washington staff last winter, David M. Shribman read these opening lines of "Out, Out--," Robert Frost's heartbreaking poem about a boy who loses his hand to a saw and dies:

The buzz-saw snarled and rattled in the yard
And made dust and dropped stove-length sticks of wood,
Sweet-scented stuff when the breeze drew across it.
And from there those that lifted eyes could count
Five mountain ranges one behind the other
Under the sunset far into Vermont.

Shribman likes to occasionally end staff meetings with a discussion of New England writers such as Frost, John Updike and Sylvia Plath. After September 11, he felt the staff needed some Frost, the quintessential American poet with his searching, often dark meditations into psychological complexities.

Last winter's hour-long poetry discussion had a purpose beyond solace--Shribman convenes these seminars to identify what he calls "the New Englandness of our region, to understand our readers."

In his nine years as bureau chief, Shribman, 48, has endeavored to retain a New England character and focus for his bureau while at the same time aiming for national impact. The result has earned the admiration of many in the Washington press corps, including Tim Phelps of Newsday and Bill McAllister, who consulted with Shribman before setting up the MediaNews bureau.

"What we're trying to do here is to be nationally local," explains Shribman. "There are two ways to do this. One way is to go to a big crime or disaster or political event and scream, 'Is anybody here from Lowell?' That doesn't get you much. The other way to do it is to think of things that people in your region care about and cover them as national issues. So my definition of local issues is to cover national issues that our local people have a passion for--which means education and medicine and politics. Those, along with the Red Sox, are our indigenous sports."

With a staff of 13 journalists, the Globe bureau is deployed to traditional Washington news beats: the White House, Congress, State Department, Pentagon, Justice, economics. But there are specialty beats as well: In recognition of Boston's dense university community, the bureau has an education reporter. When he hasn't been covering the war in Afghanistan, reporter John Donnelly has a nearly full-time beat devoted to the foreign policy implications of health issues, an assignment that has taken him to Peru to write about tuberculosis and Africa to write about HIV. "Why? Because we have a large medical establishment in Boston that cares about AIDS," Shribman says.

But why cover the White House? Why not devote the bureau strictly to enterprise and specialty beats? "If we didn't cover the White House, people would ask us what we're doing here," he answers. "We're the hometown paper of Harvard and MIT and BU."

Shribman is a New Englander, born in Salem, Massachusetts, a Dartmouth graduate, but for most of his career he has been in Washington, beginning at the Buffalo News bureau, then moving on to the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. In 1995 he won a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of Washington and the American political scene.

To show off some greatest hits, Shribman walks into the storeroom at the Globe's Connecticut Avenue office. One wall is lined with metal bookcases, four shelves high, filled with thick black binders labeled with reporters' names. He pulls down binder after binder and flips through plastic sleeves of clips, stopping frequently to tout his people.

"This was great work here," he says, stopping at a March 25 story by Michael Kranish about the use of human research subjects. "This was a great piece here," Shribman says as he points to a February 18 story about how Boston receives more NIH funding than any other city, by far.

Then Shribman pulls down the clips of Mary Leonard, the education reporter. "Faith-based bill may be windfall for universities," reads the June 21 headline. "Mary's done a lot on the faith-based plan," he explains. "It's an important issue for us--we're founded in New England on the whole question of separation of church and state."

Every seat was filled at the Senate hearing convened in June to probe the growing number of attacks on workers trying to unionize. Mario Vidales, a pro-union casino restaurant employee from Las Vegas, described how he was beaten by 10 men with tire irons and baseball bats in the employee parking lot and later fired. Eric Vizier, a boat captain from the Louisiana bayous, testified that he lost his job after being seen talking with coworkers about a union. Eight witnesses were flown in by the AFL-CIO.

It was the first congressional hearing in 14 years on illegal antiunion tactics.

But only three reporters--from the Associated Press, the Las Vegas Review-Journal and New Orleans' Times-Picayune--covered it. One could argue that the real story wasn't at that June Senate hearing anyway, but out in the field. But those stories aren't written much either these days.

In the last year, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post and Reuters have dropped regular beat coverage of the Labor Department. Only the AP devotes a full-time reporter to the department and related stories on workplace rules and enforcement affecting the nation's workers.

"Under a Republican administration, there haven't been a lot of concrete new policies or other major news developments out of the Labor Department. So the story has often been a hard sell to our editors," says Kathy Chen, a former labor reporter for the Wall Street Journal now assigned to Beijing.

That is the story, scream activists--the Labor Department is not enforcing labor laws.

"A huge story that doesn't get covered is the misclassification of workers under the Fair Labor Standards Act," says Jeffrey Wenger, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a nonprofit research organization focusing on low-wage workers. In May, the Labor Department won a $10 million settlement with Perdue Farms over its failure to pay workers for time spent putting on and removing protective clothing and gear; it also filed suit against Tyson Foods on similar charges. Those actions did receive some coverage, but Wenger says that this kind of practice by employers is widespread, as is the misclassification of workers into management positions to avoid paying overtime in industries such as telecommunications. "If I could find some money I'd do my own research," says Wenger. "I guarantee I'll find billions of dollars owed to workers for off-the-clock work. I can see the headline now: Workers owed $50 billion in back pay." With few exceptions--Newsday and the New York Times both did takeouts on child labor violations in 2000--labor law violations have in recent years been relegated to brief news stories that, at best, have been spotty and localized.

The Washington beat is a constant tug-of-war between daily and deeper pieces, between pursuing the story everyone else is chasing or breaking new ground. Reporters and bureau chiefs say that theirs is a constantly moving target, requiring new configurations, creative deployment in ever-changing patterns.

Copley News Service may not cover many federal agencies, but it has reconfigured its bureau of nine reporters to create a border beat with a California focus, concentrating on such issues as immigration, customs, trade and smuggling. The Los Angeles Times, a Washington standard-setter for beat coverage, no longer covers the Social Security Administration full time but has added an East Coast entertainment beat. "We're engaged in an endless, rolling discussion of which beats we need, and what we don't need," says Bureau Chief McManus.

Every couple of years or so, some L.A. editor or another wants the Washington bureau to establish a couple of general assignment slots. "We say no," says McManus. "Everybody should be available for GA but should have a beat. It's the way you find things out in Washington."