The shrinking statehouse press corps

Few have been hit harder by California's newspaper woes than the reporters charged with covering state government. What goes uncovered is hard to tangibly measure.

One area of coverage missing this election cycle, in which the state's media is obsessing over "eMeg" and the Senate race between Barbara Boxer and Carly Fiorina, is coverage of smaller contests like that for the office of state attorney general, the winner of which is often a lock to eventually run for governor. "Then there's the state controller, the state treasurer, and I'll just tell you, nobody's covering it." "There's nowhere near the scrutiny that California government deserves," agrees Steve Maviglio, a media strategist who was once a big part of that government—he served as former governor Gray Davis's press secretary from 2000 to 2003. "The budget story has been boiled down to: Democrats want taxes, Republicans don't. Very few people go behind the structural issues involved, the many special interests that are involved, the lobbying that goes on. We're just getting the veneer of a very complex situation." Perhaps the biggest losers in all this are newsreaders outside L.A., San Francisco, and Sacramento. In those three cities, the major papers still have a presence in the capitol and do some (though less) solid, deeper reporting. Other cities have seen papers close their Sacramento bureaus and publish wire content instead; it's neither localized nor focused on members of the legislature representing those areas.