By Carolyn Shapiro
News reporters once roamed the corridors of their state capitols in droves, covering their leaders’ and legislators’ activities for the state’s residents. About a decade ago, those statehouse journalists started to go extinct. The number of newspaper reporters assigned to their statehouses full time dropped by more than a third between 2003 and 2014, according to a Pew Research Center Report released at that time.
When longtime investigative reporter and editor Mark Horvit arrived at the University of Missouri to teach budding journalists in 2016, he saw a chance to help fill that gap. The university, fondly known as Mizzou, had students working at the statehouse in Jefferson City, Mo., as part of their learning experience for more than 40 years, but their numbers had declined, as well, Horvit said.
“Our program had shrunk at the same time that coverage in general was pulling back from all sorts of newsrooms,” Horvit said in a recent interview.
Horvit, who runs the State Government Reporting Program at Mizzou and teaches the Public Service Journalism class, built back up the student staff at the statehouse. During the legislative session from January to May, he now has 25 to 35 students working in shifts to cover the government process – from committee hearings to news conferences to final votes on bills.
The university has partnerships with the Missouri Press Association and the Missouri Broadcasters Association to distribute the students’ stories to small newspapers and commercial radio and television stations across the state that want the content. Mizzou’s statehouse audio coverage has even greater reach than the stories in print or “text” – the term he uses to encompass digital publications.
“When we do it right, we’re producing for drive-time lunch, we’re producing for drive-time dinner,” Horvit said. “And then there’s stuff for them to run in the morning. We’re doing (it in) real time. It’s the 45-second, commercial radio, on-the-hour kind of stuff.”
Horvit is paid by the university as full-time faculty and has edited all of the students’ work from the statehouse, including the audio story scripts that the students then record in a studio room and cut to air. Other professional journalists and Mizzou faculty have filled in for Horvit as statehouse editor in recent years, when he had other responsibilities. The stories for print or online publications also go through the copy desk of the Columbia Missourian, the daily newspaper that serves as the hands-on “lab” for journalism majors in their junior and senior years.
The statehouse reporting team is made up of Missourian reporters who have the state government as their primary beat, as well as the students in the Public Service Journalism class that Horvit created. “We didn’t have anything in the curriculum that taught students how to cover government from a journalism perspective.” Horvit also has a few students doing independent studies in statehouse coverage. Because of the demand for radio stories, the audio reporting students can get credit or payment for their work, and most opt for credit, he said.
Large papers including the Kansas City Star and St. Louis Post-Dispatch never fully abandoned capital coverage, Horvit said. But print publications covering small and rural communities in Missouri lack the staff to devote to the statehouse and increasingly find membership in the Associated Press wire service too expensive to justify.
Because of that coverage gap for those small papers, many of them weeklies, Mizzou has found grant funding for its legislative reporters to continue working through the summer to cover the most pressing statewide issues, said Elizabeth Stephens, the university’s journalism professor who serves as the executive editor of the Missourian. That started with summer 2020, when COVID-19 quashed students’ internship options outside of school. The grants paid the students to write pandemic-related stories that they made available to publications across the state.
Each summer since then, they have focused on a different topic. “This last summer we did, it was how laws and regulations really impact people on the ground,” Stephens said. One story looked at highway expansion across the state and the changes it would impose on nearby towns. The grant money also covered the cost of a professional editor to manage those students, Stephens added.
At the state capital, Mizzou’s reporting team has led the way for new players in the news business to focus their attention on the state legislature. Nonprofit digital news organizations including the Missouri Independent and Kansas City Beacon now have a steady reporting presence in Jefferson City. The Mizzou statehouse newsroom also will host a TV station that plans to dedicate a full-time team to report on the upcoming legislative session, Horvit said.
“We’re being followed by organizations, whether their nonprofit or for-profit that are using professional full time journalists to have presence in the statehouse again,” Horvit said.
By serving the network of smaller news entities across the state, Mizzou students have learned how to dig out the issues that are most important to those communities. And they deliver them work with the same quality and high journalistic standards of much bigger publications, Horvit said.
“It’s just as important that the news you get is right and accurate and complete as it is if you’re getting your news from a major metro,” he said. “So (students) have to understand the standards, they have to have the direction and, I think, some of the basic building blocks of what government is.”
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