"The local news business is in crisis. The nation is currently losing two community newspapers a week, on average, and 70 million Americans live in news deserts, communities with little or no local news coverage. In much of the remaining territory, all that’s left are decimated newsrooms and advertisement-heavy publications with little local news, sometimes called “ghost papers.”
The problem is even more acute when it comes to covering the nation’s statehouses. The total number of full-time statehouse reporters declined by 6% from 2014 to 2022. Yet state legislatures handle key issues, including abortion rights, voting rights and educational curriculum standards.
Where full-time staff reporters have disappeared, university-led statehouse reporting programs have stepped in, according to research from the nonprofit, nonpartisan Pew Research Center. More than 10% of statehouse reporters are students, and in some states they are a significant presence in the statehouse media corps."
See the full Nieman report HERE. It points out the effort by Alabama State University to bolster coverage of the Alabama Legislature by using students.
The old Week-In-Review, with reporters.
When I was hired to anchor/host "For The Record" on the Alabama Public Television Network of nine stations in 1998, one of the first questions I asked News Director Johanna Cleary during my interview was how to handle interviewing legislators, knowing that they had the vote for or against APT funding.
I was pleased to hear her say I should ignore it, and simply press on with whatever were appropriate questions.
Only once in the almost ten years that I hosted the show did a legislator mention that budgeting power. I ignored him, and in fact may have been a little more direct in questioning him that night.
Stacy has a mostly political PR background, as far as I can tell, exclusively for Republicans like Martha Roby, Bob Riley, and Mike Hubbard. That probably helps him, since Alabama is now such a GOP dominant state.
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