Major news bureau considered closing Statehouse office

George Ryan, Rod Blagojevich, Pat Quinn and potentially Bill Brady. The Statehouse press corps has watched them all, but with each new governor fewer and fewer eyes make up the group of journalists in the Capitol who observe, investigate and report on Illinois government and the General Assembly.

That trend might have continued, as the Arlington Heights Daily Herald, Illinois' third largest newspaper, considered eliminating its only Statehouse position after its Springfield bureau chief, John Patterson, left last month for a job with the Illinois Senate Democrats. For weeks, the newspaper, citing the economy, was undecided on whether to fill the position, but editor and senior vice president John Lampinen said earlier this week that the position would be filled, at least, he hoped, before the fall veto session.

Still, the Illinois Statehouse press corps has grown smaller and smaller. In the last three years alone, four newspaper organizations have closed their Statehouse offices, leaving only eight daily print offices open. The trend is detrimental to the public, media observers say, especially considering the state's record budget deficit of $13 billion and a recent track record of questionable governorships.

“Statehouse bureaus, particularly the newspaper bureaus, have really provided an important element of accountability,” says Mike Lawrence, a former Statehouse reporter and later director of the Paul Simon Public Policy Institute at Southern Illinois University. “I don’t think there’s been a time in the history of this state when there was a greater need for accountability. We’ve had a series of scandals and there’s really a need to hold government officials accountable. And I think that will diminish if we continue to see a decline in Statehouse staffing.”

“I would hope that the people in charge of these media properties would think about ... some of the responsibilities that come with the First Amendment.”

While the latest Springfield office closings – the Champaign News-Gazette in January 2008, the Rockford Register Star in August 2008, Small Newspaper Group in August 2009, and the Peoria Journal Star in December 2009 – as well as the shuttering of wire service United Press International’s bureau in 1999 – are cause for concern, so too is the shrinking staff of the remaining bureaus.

“The more coverage you have of state government, the more accountability there will be in state government,” says Jon Broadbooks, executive editor at Springfield’s State Journal-Register. “The more people you have, the better the coverage.” The SJ-R’s bureau chief, Ryan Keith, resigned earlier this year, but Broadbooks says the paper will fill the position.

As one of several papers owned by GateHouse Media, the number of Statehouse reporters the SJ-R can draw from has decreased as its sister papers’ bureaus have closed and the company has eliminated positions. Previously owned, along with the Peoria Journal-Star, by Copley News Service, the SJ-