Roundhouse Reporting – Then and Now

When I started covering the Legislature more than 15 years ago, I was totally intimidated by the state’s Capitol press corps. Back then political reporting was dominated by the same rumpled, grizzled characters who starred in every black-and-white movie you never saw about the news business. For me, reporting from Santa Fe felt like a low-budget remake of His Girl Friday, with me as a vertically challenged and deeply un-glamourous Rosalind Russell, surrounded by a bunch of cigar-chomping guys in fedoras. (Fact check: no cigars or fedoras were present).

I learned a lot from those guys. Experienced statehouse reporter Trip Jennings, a regular on our show now, was my mentor at the New Mexico Independent, and he taught me almost everything I learned in those early sessions: how to decipher the acronym soup of the Legislature’s website, how to behave in a committee hearing, what it means for a bill to be “only mostly dead.”     

Steve Terrell had been a reporter at The New Mexican, the Albuquerque Journal and the Santa Fe Reporter for 30 years before I started following him around like a puppy asking for phone numbers and directions to the bathroom. I never wrote about the state budget back in those days because Barry Massey did it for the Associated Press. And how could I ever compare? I was already faking like I knew what a funding formula was. Barry had been doing legislative coverage for the AP since before I got my first period.     

But this was only a few years into the wave of digital disruption that knocked our industry on its tuchus. The number of mid-career reporters in this country dropped by 42% between 2008 and 2018. Here in New Mexico, newsrooms had been hemorrhaging money and one by one, they lost their most experienced staffers to buyouts, layoffs, early retirements and lateral moves into better-paying PR jobs. Nationwide, news job losses rose nearly 50% in 2023 alone.    

But in Santa Fe the picture is at least somewhat better. We lost a lot of institutional memory in our press corps, but we’ve gained a surprising number of younger reporters who bring fresh energy to the Roundhouse. And I’m loving it!    

This week, for the first time ever, I was able to invite three young women on New Mexico in Focus to talk about their reporting on the legislative session. And they killed it. All three graduated from college within the last eight years and pounded the halls of the Roundhouse all session, filing incredibly complicated stories about tax packages, strategic water supplies and medical malpractice caps. They represent renewed commitment and investment from news organizations that recognize how vital it is to have many sets of eyes and ears watching over the business of the state.     

In one way here, New Mexico follows a national trend showing the number of statehouse reporters has started to rise — but fewer of them are on the beat full time. And that’s true of Margaret O’Hara, Megan Gleason and Danielle Prokop, who converged on the Roundhouse for the session but will go back to general assignment, business and environmental coverage after the session’s over. And I think that’s OK, given our short sessions. We’re building up expertise we’ll need in the future.    

That’s one of the things I’m working on right now with a research project funded by Press Forward New Mexico and UNM’s Center for Regional Studies. We’re surveying newsrooms to find out how many journalists they have on staff and what they’re covering. That will help us build an interactive map showing the state’s news deserts — and news oases. We’re also surveying residents about how they get news and information. Our hope is that we can use this data to drive innovation and investment into solutions for what remains a crisis in local news.

We’d love to have your input on our survey. Won’t you take a few minutes to fill it out today? You could win one of two iPads we’re giving away — but more importantly you could help us continue to build and rebuild local news in New Mexico. The future looks pretty bright! 

– Gwyneth Doland 
Politics Correspondent, New Mexico in Focus 
Professor of Practice, UNM Communication and Journalism