With the appointment of a new editor who will coordinate coverage between Washington and bureaus around the country, the Associated Press is embarking on a plan to report on the federal government and national issues in a more complete, contextualized way, rather than relying on the view from Washington.
In her new post as an assistant Washington bureau chief, Wendy Benjaminson will supervise a dozen regional reporters who cover beats that align with their geographies. But unlike her predecessor, she will seek ways to connect those reporters to bureaus around the country, where AP reporters often find themselves working on similar stories — but from a different perspective.
Benjaminson said she hopes to identify trends earlier and capitalize on the source networks of reporters based in Washington and the states, resulting in a “larger, smarter story that can not only go in the local paper but can go national as well.”
“She will be charged with spotting trends and coordinating reporting from the states and from the nation’s capital on issues such as spending and deficits, immigration, pensions and Medicaid,” the AP said in announcing the change on Thursday.
“The ultimate goal of the move,” said Mike Oreskes, AP’s managing editor for U.S. news, in a phone interview, “is even more and even more robust news about state government and about actions in Washington that affect the statehouse.”
The change comes at a particularly important time, Oreskes said, as the federal government is ratcheting back on its state funding. Those funds have helped state governments ride out the recession.
“Washington is slowly turning down the spigot,” he said. “That’s both a Washington story and a story in every single state.”
Lessons from covering the drug war
Benjaminson, who has overseen the AP’s wide-ranging coverage of the drug war in the U.S. and Mexico, has some experience coordinating coverage among reporters who answer to different editors across North and Central America. She worked with reporters in Mexico City, Guatemala, Colombia, and throughout the Southwest.
Once her team of reporters started working together, they began to ferret out connections to the drug war that otherwise could have gone unreported. Reporters in other parts of the country not typically associated with the drug war — Wisconsin and Seattle, for example — started to contact her when they saw stories that seemed tied to the bigger story.
And in working together, the coverage started to reflect the unique nature of the border region.
“It’s not a line between two countries; it really is a region,” Benjaminson said. “It’s called la frontera; it’s an area that is both Mexico and the United States and neither Mexico or the United States.”
AP protects core state coverage
Benjaminson said she hopes to avoid the disconnect that can occur between reporters based in Washington and those around the country. For example, some recent coverage of Texas Gov. Rick Perry has portrayed him as a creature of the tea party, she said, but reporters in Texas “know he was tea party before tea party was cool.”
“We at the AP want to collect that intelligence, those resources, and put it in our national coverage and not have it dictated by Washington, where sometimes the conventional wisdom … is wrong,” she said.
“This is not to say that the inside-the-beltway perspective doesn’t change reality. It can be become political reality, anyway.”
The change occurs as the AP has found itself having to prove its worth to members who have been looking to cut newsgathering costs over the last several years.
Dissatisfaction with AP’s rates came to a head a few years ago but has mostly abated, as my colleague Rick Edmonds reported in October after talking with Tom Curley, AP’s CEO and president.
But the New Hampshire Union Leader dropped the AP on Jan. 1, opting instead to rely on Reuters America and the McClatchy-Tribune Information Services. Publisher Joseph McQuaid said he thought the AP’s diminished coverage of New Hampshire wasn’t worth the cost.
“We were providing more of AP’s New Hampshire report than we were receiving,” McQuaid said in a Union Leader story.
“We obviously recognize that there are lots of others that are trying to nibble away at our franchise, and we’re not going to let them,” Oreskes said. “This has been a core franchise of the AP as long as it’s been a co-op.”
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