Washington Weak

The District of Columbia is used to a cyclical game of who's your neighbor. It's the nature of a city filled with people who move in and head out with the political tide. But, as a thoughtful article in the American Journalism Review notes, there's one group who seems to be leaving for good -- local newspaper Washington correspondents.

Jennifer Dorroh mentions in the piece a growing list of publications that are choosing to scale back or cut entirely the D.C. bureau. As detailed in the story, a diminished Washington presence means that newspapers will be less able to hold public officials accountable and less likely to find the next big scandal, let alone chronicle day-to-day activity on The Hill.

Wire services can cover the big national stories, but there's no replacement for reporters who know what readers in a given region want to see covered. You can blog about Washington all you want, but face-to-face access is still the name of the game.