A boom for those who cover Congress

At a time when almost every newspaper in America withered, The Hill has thrived in the last eight years, growing faster than it ever has before. Once a weekly, the paper recently went to five days a week, with all-day coverage on the Web. Its newsroom has ballooned to 60 journalists. Of course, it helps that The Hill’s beat is Congress and Capitol Hill, where the good times have been rolling for just about everyone in the news business.

“There’s a huge interest in the nitty-gritty of what goes on here,” says The Hill's Hugo Gurdon of both his and his competitors’ fortunes. “It seems the interest in covering this area is not diminished.” That seems to be an understatement.

Just about everywhere you look, news sites and publications are adding more reporters to cover Congress. While many city halls and state capitals have lost news-media enterprise, Capitol Hill looks like journalism’s growth market. Last fall, the venerable National Journal underwent a massive makeover, hiring a platoon of big-name Washington journalists, including Fox News’s Major Garrett, and fattening its editorial ranks by about 10 percent, to a staff of 100. Bloomberg, already a big player on the Hill, has added 150 staffers for the launch of Bloomberg Government, a trove of news, policy data and wonk intel that costs subscribers $5,700 a year. Politico has a similar venture called Politico Pro and added about three dozen staffers for its launch last month.