Deep in a back wing on the fourth floor of the Massachusetts Statehouse there\u2019s a room\u2014456\u2014reserved for journalists.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThere used to be bitter fights over every square inch of territory, because every newspaper wanted to have someone with a desk at the Statehouse,\u201d says Chris Daly, a professor of journalism and Statehouse bureau chief for the Associated Press from 1982 to 1989.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThe AP had four or five people. The Christian Science Monitor had a person whose only job was to cover state government, the Lowell Sun, the Lawrence Eagle-Tribune, on and on and on, and we were all jammed in there,\u201d he says. \u201cNow, that room is empty and cavernous\u2014there are echoes. There\u2019s hardly anybody working there.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Jerry Berger, a lecturer in journalism, was the Statehouse bureau chief for the news service United Press International around the same time Daly was there. He now heads COM\u2019s Statehouse Program, which provides students\u2014mostly seniors and graduate students\u2014the opportunity to report on politics for more than a dozen news outlets around Massachusetts. Though a 2022 Pew report found that the number of statehouse reporters has gone up across the US since 2014, it also found there are fewer working the beat full-time. \u201cPart-time beat reporters can\u2019t do the job as well as someone based in the building full-time who can hear gossip in the coffee shop and hallways and drop by offices to chat with lawmakers and their staffs,\u201d Berger says. He adds that virtually every publication that his students work with used to have its own Statehouse reporter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Today, COM\u2019s Statehouse Program is the largest news operation covering Beacon Hill. And that\u2019s just one of the programs that give COM students journalism experience while helping provide coverage of important local news in an industry that\u2019s been contracting for decades.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At its most extreme, that contraction has led to the creation of news deserts\u2014areas without local, independent journalism. A February 2022 Columbia Journalism Review article, \u201cOur Local News Situation is Even Worse Than We Think,\u201d called the deterioration of local journalism \u201ca truly bleak picture,\u201d and cited a US Bureau of Labor Statistics report that shows a 57 percent decline in newspaper newsroom employees since 2004.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThis is a great time to be a corrupt politician,\u201d says Daly, an expert on the history of journalism and author of Covering America: A Narrative History of a Nation\u2019s Journalism (University of Massachusetts Press, 2012). \u201cThere\u2019s hardly anybody left anymore who\u2019s studying these things and watching, and who knows how to read a budget.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A 2022 report from Northwestern\u2019s Medill School of Journalism Local News Initiative provides a grim statistic: more than 20 percent of Americans live in a news desert or a community at risk of becoming a news desert. Papers have shut down because of a loss in subscriptions and ad revenue as people have turned to social media and other online platforms. But many of these news deserts exist in low-income, rural areas that also lack reliable internet access. As the problem spreads, even affluent suburbs are losing their papers as media conglomerates merge or close more papers. \u201cSeventy million people live in the more than 200 counties without a newspaper, or in the 1,630 counties with only one paper\u2014usually a weekly\u2014covering multiple communities spread over a vast area,\u201d the report adds.<\/p>\n\n\n\n