But for those looking to reduce costs, trimming back coverage in ancillary areas is a sensible step, said media analyst Merrill Brown.
In particular, news publishers now pay more attention to the kinds of reporting that attract and retain digital subscribers—a line of business that has grown increasingly important in recent years.
Both publishers have core competencies in other arenas—the Times in regional reporting and Hollywood, and the Journal in business news and finance—that are likely better sources of return than investments in challenger categories, said Brown.
“Readers of the Times and the Journal are not placing subscription orders to read political coverage,” Brown said. “In periods of retrenchment, sticking to your core competencies is an axiom.”
D.C. bureaus decline while political reporting flourishes
While recent cuts have highlighted the dwindling investment in D.C. bureaus, regional outlets have been slowly shrinking their presence in the district for years, according to reporting from the Columbia Journalism Review.
Publishers including the Tampa Bay Times, Omaha World-Herald, St. Louis Post-Dispatch and The Denver Post all had Washington correspondents until recently, their disappearance a casualty of the shifting economics of digital media.
The internet has eliminated the geographical monopolies these publishers once had, and readers can now turn to any number of D.C. outlets for their political coverage, said Northeastern University professor Dan Kennedy.
Local outlets still need to ensure that their readers have access to reporting about how federal legislation affects their local government, but there are dozens of publishers covering the presidential election. Voters looking for insightful coverage of national races have, still, more coverage than they can make sense of.
“Does anyone believe there are too few people covering the election?” Kennedy said. “If anything, some of these reporters could be reassigned to cover other stories that are going untold.”
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