Mainstream media in DC declines

The press corps covering Washington D.C. has not so much declined as been dramatically transformed, according to a study released today by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism. While the number of mainstream outlets monitoring the federal government has shrunk, a sector of more narrowly focused niche publications has grown significantly and there has been a dramatic increase in the ranks of foreign journalists based there.

The PEJ report documents the marked decline in the reporting power of the mainstream media, a trend especially evident in the newspaper sector. Since the 1980s, the number of papers accredited to cover Congress has fallen by two-thirds. The ranks of newspapers with a general presence in Washington have been thinned by more than 50% in the same period.

At the same time, there has been major growth spurt for more narrowly targeted publications in Washington . The number of niche newspapers, newsletters and magazines often offering specialized information to more elite audiences has increased by half since the mid-1980s.

And despite cutbacks in foreign bureaus by many U.S. media outlets, the number of overseas reporters working in Washington has dramatically increased—rising nearly tenfold since the U.S. State Department opened a Foreign Press Center in the nation’s capital in 1968.

Among the report’s findings:

◆ Of the nation’s 1,400 newspapers, 32 of them—representing just 23 states—had their own bureaus in Washington at the beginning of 2008. That is roughly half the number in the mid-1980s, when 71 newspapers representing 35 states were operating in the city.

◆ The number of local TV and radio stations with access to feeds and news stories from corporate news bureaus in Washington has fallen 37% from the mid-1980s to 92 stations, down from 146.

◆ The number of news executives, correspondents and anchors in Washington for the three traditional broadcast networks has fallen by more than half since the 1980s, from 110 in 1985 to 51 in early 2008. And that was before another round of cutbacks in 2008.

◆ In the past year, a number of bureaus vanished altogether, while others were reduced exponentially. Newhouse Newspapers, Copley and the Copley News Service, Cox (in March of 2009), the (Salt Lake City) Deseret News, the Fairbanks News-Miner, the Portland Press-Herald/Maine Sunday Telegram, the (MA) Lowell Sun and