The Decline in State Government Coverage
State government plays a critical role in most Americans’ everyday lives, addressing issues such as education, benefit programs, the criminal justice system, protecting its residents from local threats, maintaining state roads and highways and much more. But coverage of state government and politics has been in decline for years.
A 2010 University of Illinois at Chicago study found that, between 1976 and 2010, there were more than 13,000 federal convictions of state and local officials, and that was just among the top 15 states with the most convictions.
Yet, a 2014 assessment of state capitol press corps by the Pew Research Center found that the number of newspaper reporters covering state capitols declined by 35 percent between 2003 and 2014. Less than one-third of newspapers today assign even one reporter to the statehouse. Among local TV news stations, it is just 14 percent. In Florida alone, the number of journalists stationed in Tallahassee and assigned to cover the Legislature and government agencies has dwindled by as much as half in the last decade, by some estimates.
The Pew study calculated there were 1,592 statehouse reporters in 2014, of which fewer than half were employed full-time on the state capitol beat, ranging from 53 in Texas to two in South Dakota.
In Washington State, for example, there are 147 state lawmakers and 600 to 800 lobbyists, but only 5 or 6 full-time reporters, journalist Austin Jenkins shared on NPR.
“The professional news media’s watchdog role in state capitals has been stripped of its vigilance and rigor,” said Diane McFarlin, dean of the UF College of Journalism and Communications and former publisher of the Sarasota (Florida) Herald-Tribune. “The result is that citizens don’t know what they don’t know, and the danger is that corruption and malfeasance can proceed unchecked.”
The Collier Prize for State Government Accountability at the University of Florida will serve to encourage coverage of the seats of government of every state in the nation. This prize will be one of the largest journalism awards in the nation and undoubtedly the largest focused on state government.