News organizations ranging from the Los Angeles Times to The Wall Street Journal are cutting their Washington bureaus. Will that detract from public knowledge about the 2024 presidential campaign? I told Mark Stenberg of Adweek that it would not — and we’d be better off if we’d focus on areas where there are real reporting deficits. Stenberg writes:
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.”