Rockford Register Star layoffs: a failure to understand the hyperlocal benefit of a statehouse bureau
Today the Rockford Register Star announced layoffs of 13 full- and part-time employees. This follows a previous round of 17 buyouts. Among those laid off today was a really great mentor and friend of mine: Aaron Chambers, the Springfield bureau chief.
I worked under Chambers as reporting intern while I was in the Public Affairs Reporting program at the University of Illinois in Springfield. He had great enterprise ideas, was brutally honest with me and taught me a lot about Illinois government that only his years of observing and reporting could have given him. He never backed down when discussing an issue with you and wasn’t afraid to question sources intensely. When it came to editing my stories, he helped hone my work and made me stress double-checking the details before I showed him a draft. And he became — and still is — a friend.
Chambers is a hell of a reporter that did some damned fine work at the Capitol, and he certainly doesn’t need anyone to vouch for him, especially not a former intern. He’s got the articles, columns and even a blog to prove it. So, that’s why I was disappointed to read this in the story bylined by the Register Star’s executive editor:
The newspaper also closed its Springfield bureau today, a step that had been considered five years ago and again 18 months ago.
“We kept the bureau open through some previous tough times,” said Linda Grist Cunningham, executive editor. “Frankly, I made a choice between the bureau in Springfield and local news in the Rock River Valley. It’s a loss, but losing another local reporter would have been worse.”
I have to take issue with the idea that losing a so-called “local” reporter would be worse than shutting the bureau down.
Even before hyperlocal newspaper chain GateHouse bought the Register Star from Gannett, the articles coming out of the bureau were hyperlocal. I know from experience that any story I did had to have a Rockford focus to make it relevant to the local readership, otherwise the editors wouldn’t consider it.
This was more than just quoting the local legislators. This meant cold-calling through a phone book to find some “real person” to quote in the story about how an issue affected them. When most bureau reporters could have tied off the story, extra time was spent localizing, even arranging for photographs to be taken so local art went with the piece and gave the story a better presentation.
At times, this was maddening to do, but if you’re looking for an example of how to make statewide, government and political issues local, I can’t think of a better example.
And this brings me to my disagreement with the executive editor’s statement. If you goal is to only cover Rockford in a geographic sense by having reporters only physically in your town, then you’re failing at hyperlocal. There are things happening across the state that will resonate in Rockford, especially when it comes to legislative action at the Capitol.
Simply dismissing the Springfield bureau’s work as not “local” either means you weren’t paying attention to the actual content of the articles and packages produced or you failed to communicate properly what you wanted from the bureau.
This isn’t the kind of coverage you can replace with one-size-fits-all articles from the Associated Press. I know for a fact during my internship of several stories, big and small, that would have gone unnoticed if the bureau didn’t constantly have a presence at the Capitol. State government is a complex and nuanced beast that’s difficult enough to sort out when you’re at the heart of it, let alone hours and miles away.
I’m well aware that layoffs happen (see Paper Cuts or Mark Potts’ coverage) in the journalism industry, especially this year, and will probably get worse. But it makes no sense to cutback on the bread and butter of what journalism is supposed to be: being the fourth estate acting as the watchdog of government. If anything, that should be the last coverage to go.
Hyperlocal doesn’t mean physically constraining yourself to the city limits. It means presenting information in a context that’s relevant to your audience. There is a vast array of issues facing Illinois that the government is directly involved in that residents in Rockford will probably want to know (or, at least, should know about). It’s simple to see that a news organization and its readership would benefit from is someone who has the experience and institutional knowledge of working a beat for several years on the scene.
To let that go is a damned shame. If you’re trying to build a quality product for your consumer, then you don’t shed valuable resources. Instead, you should consolidate around your core product. In journalism, that’s public affairs coverage. And if you don’t see a bureau dedicated to covering state government as valuable in the news business, then what do are you providing of value?
UPDATE: I checked the Rockford Register Star’s homepage and also this page listing their staff blogs. Neither of them link to Chamber’s state government beat blog. And I know for a fact that his blog used to be linked off of the homepage. I hope they don’t delete his blog, as it is a great resource of information for a person who may not know the ins and outs of state government’s inner workings. Plus, this year’s PAR intern had some great posts on there as well.
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