Walking back into Minneapolis City Hall last fall for the first time in more than 30 years offered a stark contrast to the experiences I had there as a reporter in the late ’70s and life as we know it today.
Back then, most news organizations were still operating on the beat system. A City Hall reporter went there every day looking for stories. We all had our sources, and we all knew how to gossip. Most days, we could find something that would get us into the first five minutes of the newscast or on the front page of some section of the newspaper.
City Hall was a good beat. And there were a lot of good reporters wandering around asking questions and listening to the debate of the day. City Council meetings drew a crowd.
When I covered the beat for WCCO-TV, there would be a half-dozen newspaper reporters, two or three television stations and a few folks from radio. You had to come early to get a seat and a place for your camera.
Where’d all the reporters go?
Now when I head to City Hall to report for Two Cities, I find myself missing that crowd of reporters. Most days now, I see Steve Brandt from the Star Tribune. Steve is an excellent reporter, but he’s moving to a new beat. Sometimes the Star Tribune sends Eric Roper, who is also good at his job. By my count, that’s three of us at City Hall. I see other people taking notes and, occasionally, a television videographer but never with a reporter.
Back in the late ’70s, those who inhabited newsrooms and city rooms believed news folks needed to make decisions about what stories were important in their lives. And we believed that government news was high on that list.
Then someone invented the focus group – one of those gathering of citizens who are given nice snacks and asked to share their opinions on a product. One of the “products” they analyzed was the television news operation where I was a foot soldier.
What these citizens often said was that they did not want so much government news. They especially did not want Minneapolis City Hall news or St. Paul City Hall news, because many of them lived in the Happy Suburbs. News from the core city did not apply to their lives. Or so they thought.
They wanted more trend news. They wanted news about interesting people. They wanted news they could use. Many said they had moved to a Happy Suburb to get away from Minneapolis and St. Paul and did not want to waste their time on the troubles of life in the big cities.
And, in large part, they got what they wanted. But the retreat from government reporting was slow. Old habits die hard even in newsrooms. City Hall reporters still knew how to find a story, but the prominence the story received started to sink from Section One of the newscast to Section Two.
My newspaper colleagues were high-minded about their dedication to government news until their editors discovered focus groups, too. Then it got a little harder to get that government news on a section front.
Different times, technology
Times and technology change. Now, those Minneapolis City Council meetings are telecast on Channel 79. You can watch from the safety of your own living room as council members debate the fees to license a dog or work their way through the budget. But you can’t ask questions after the meeting like a reporter can if they are in the building.
And if there are two competing reporters in the building, you know that each of them will be trying to get something for their story that the other won’t have. News is still a competitive business — which is why I miss that crowd of reporters.
Ten reporters asking questions is better for the public than one or two reporters asking questions. And the person who wins at this game is not the reporter but the person who reads, watches or listens to the story.
When reporters do their jobs well, the big winners are the people who know a little more, understand a little more and can make some good decisions because someone asked important questions on their behalf. That part of the news business has never changed.
Thank you for this excellent history and analysis.
We have to rely on talk radio conservatives and
TV “investigative reporters” chasing ratings to
pay any attention any more. Very sad.
I definitely agree that it would be better to see more local government news covered in the press. You don’t mention the impact of the internet, however, which I think is also important. Those who are engaged in local issues can get more information more easily now – I can email my city council member, for example, or read e-democracy discussions to find out about local issues. TV news coverage is so inadequate I never consider it, though the Strib does a good job when they try, I think.
But on the other hand, those who aren’t already interested in these things and don’t seek them out are certainly less informed than they were before. The work of a good reporter is definitely missed in this respect, especially the context and synthesis a good news article can give someone who maybe isn’t paying attention all the time.
This is spot-on for St. Paul, too. I have covered city and county government in St. Paul and Ramsey County for more than two decades for the neighborhood papers. At the risk of sounding like I park my dinosaur in the Victory Ramp, it’s hard seeing the changes. People used to want the St. Paul beat and not treat it like some kind of punishment. It’s pretty sad when the monthly and twice-monthly neighborhood papers do so much more city and county government coverage than the dailies do.
Two notes:
*A Summit Hill resident once called the Pi Press about an issue in that neighborhood and was told, “If people in Eagan don’t care, we don’t care.” Yes, the money may be in the ‘burbs but let’s be a little more tactful, OK?
*I’d also like to cite what some of us in St. Paul referred to as the “Woodbury effect.” When the dailies could beef up staff back in the day, more troops were deployed to the ‘burbs, much to our amusement in the city and to the annoyance of my suburban community journalist colleagues. Then we’d get this odd imbalance of news.
I’d get my papers* and read how Rosemount is getting a (insert fast food restaurant name here), Roseville’s Boy Scouts are recycling Christmas trees, Woodbury was having its community garage sale and someone got shot on Rice Street in St. Paul. I understand the need to generate copy and get stories in from your beat but wow, it just created this odd morning read. I once had the North End Business Association vice president in my office at North End News/Frogtown Times, complaining about why OUR new Auto Zone didn’t merit a story in the daily paper . . . .
*And yeah, I read papers. Made of paper. I’m old. And once a year, if you visit the Minnesota State Fair and Heritage Square, you might catch me running a press in the newspaper museum
Jane, I just wanted to say that I receive the paper in which your byline appears at the top of practically half the articles, and I really appreciate the hard work you must be putting in. Thanks for sticking with it.
I am not sure things were better in the past in terms of information. The focus on what was happening at city hall mislead people about the importance of those stories. There are far more sources of information about what is going on in the city that give people a much more complete picture than they could get in the past. Of course, you still need to seek that information out. But that was true then as well.
As the editor in charge of the Star Tribune’s Minneapolis team, I can assure you that this paper has a renewed commitment to covering the city. When I arrived here six years ago, everyone was talking about the suburbs – and that makes sense, given that’s where most people live. But we’ve realized since then that people outside the core cities care about what’s happening there. We have two reporters assigned to cover City Hall full-time – Eric Roper will be joined in a few weeks by Maya Rao. Steve Brandt covers schools, Matt McKinney covers public safety and Randy Furst covers housing and general assignments. I am glad to see MinnPost and other media also beefing up their city coverage. We need as much as we can get.
Spot on, Karen.
When I was on the City Council in the 1970s, we had the Star and the Tribune with permanent (and always messy) desks in the newsroom on the City Council floor of City Hall. On City Council meeting days or days when a major committee met, they were almost always joined by ‘CCO radio and three TV stations — WCCO-TV, KSTP that I think was NBC back then and KMSP that was ABC back then. For a big story, they’d be joined by WTCN Channel 11 – the independent back then and even the Dispatch, Pioneer Press and KSTP radio.
Thanks for stirring this particular pot. It needs it.
Here’s a crazy idea: let the city councils stream their meetings, with live input from the citizenry, ala the Republican debates.
I welcome Karen to the beat, but as a regular face in City Hall, I’m disappointed she doesn’t count me as one of the regulars. I write weekly columns about City Hall for the Southwest Journal and Downtown Journal. I’m at nearly ever council meeting and plenty of committee meetings. I wrote an in-depth series about the city budget last summer. I would encourage anyone interested in the city to pick up a copy of either paper on news racks around town, or to visit southwestjournal.com or downtownjournal.com.
Also, Brandt Williams of MPR covers City Hall at times, as well as the occasional drop-in from Patch and City Pages.
“One of the “products” they analyzed was the television news operation where I was a foot soldier. What these citizens often said was that they did not want so much government news.”
Up until about ten years ago it was my habit to come home from work, plop into the Barcalounger, turn on the network news at 5:30 and the local news at 6. No more. One day I turned to my wife and said, “Have you ever noticed that every news story is about government?”
Good grief, people. The TV news and the front page of the dailies are nothing but stories about government, even though most people’s lives are filled with everything but. The average viewer/reader tries to have as little contact with government as possible because the experience is generally not a good one.
It makes sense to most of us on the right that the press is synonymous with the party of government. We get it. They consider it a demotion to work on anything else. But if you’re going to insist that only government is newsworthy, you would do better in the focus groups if you would at least include more stories of how the taxpayers are getting screwed and not so much the politicians.
As is often the case, Mr. Tester lives in a world I don’t recognize.
Not being a native of the area, I read the ‘Strib all the way through in the morning, catch up with MinnPost during the day, and watch the “ratings leader” in the Twin Cities every evening. Almost never are there *any* stories about government on television, much less “every” story.
The cliché that says “If it bleeds, it leads” is all too true here when it comes to local TV. Today’s lead stories were a semi-trailer truck driven into a pond by a driver with a sketchy driving record, and extended coverage of the high school hockey player paralyzed by a fellow teenaged player or two in a local hockey game.
The TV station’s “political reporter” did get a minute or two of air time, but essentially, he was talking about whether Ramsey County and the City of Minneapolis would get their “final plan” for a new Vikings stadium to the Governor by Mr. Dayton’s deadline next week. That’s a story about the Vikings, not about government.
TV being a visual medium, just about anything for which video is available – fire, flood, murder, volcanoes erupting on the other side of the planet, bad weather in Arizona – is going to take precedence over a story about local government, which usually involves the infamous “talking heads.” An “in-depth” story on television news is anything longer than a minute, which would be hilarious if it weren’t so sad – and such an incredible disservice to the public.
Mr. Tester might have a point about network news being heavy on government coverage, but there’s plenty of research to show that viewers of network news broadcasts are largely aging white males. That’s not the demographic that advertisers want to capture, and ratings have been on a downhill slope for those programs for years. Beyond that, of course, on a national news broadcast, some of us *want* to see stories about government. Mr. Tester may prefer as little contact with government as possible, but I’ve not encountered anything on *any* news media suggesting that Mr. Tester is qualified to speak for or about the “average” viewer/reader.
In the end, I have to agree with Karen. The more people there are who are keeping an eye on what’s going on at City Hall, Public Works, the Capitol, the DNR, and so on, the better it is for everyone likely to be influenced by what happens in those places, and that’s a LOT of people if we’re just talking about Minneapolis or St. Paul. Toss in the Capitol and its part-time occupants, and it’s the entire state.
“Mr. Tester might have a point about network news being heavy on government coverage … and ratings have been on a downhill slope for those programs for years.”
Gee, I wonder why.
Who watches the evening news anymore? I gave up on it years ago. From always having a cutesy story to people waving, to the “weather paranoia” or the Vikings taking up all the “news” I just can’t watch.
I live in St. Paul and every time I follow what the city council does is just ticks me off. Why would the rest of the metro area want to follow what Dave Thune and the gang are up to?
Ever think it’s the rest of the viewers experiencing DFL fatigue?
One other thing.
If the reporters actually asked the city council members tough questions it would help.