How To Cover Campaigns

Chris Hayes has some suggestions for how the press corps could improve campaign reportage. I particularly like this one:

Assign campaign coverage to beat reporters. When Obama released his tax plan. the article that ran in the TImes about the plan was authored by the Obama beat reporter Jeff Zeleny. Zeleny’s a perfectly good political reporter, and he’s been following Obama since ‘03, when he was writing for the Trib, but there’s no earthly reason to think he’s well-equipped to report on a tax plan. Meanwhile, the Times happens to have on staff the Pulizer-Prize-winning David Cay Johnston, who is unquestionably the single best tax reporter in the country. Why wouldn’t you assign him to write the piece about Obama’s tax plan? The same goes for every substantive area of policy. The Post and the Times have reporters who know a lot about environmental policy, health policy, fiscal policy, etc.. Why not have them cover those aspects of the campaign?

The biggest problem, though, is one that he identifies earlier: There's just not that much to say. The papers have been printing daily stories about the 2008 election for the last year. Not all of those stories had to be written, or had anything to say. But if the paper doesn't have continual 2008 coverage, they'll lose their political readers to an outlet that does. This is the big problem for outlets that want to be substantive: To survive, you need to retain readers. To retain readers, you need to focus on what they're interested in. Sometimes, what they're interested in is not "news," at least not in the quantities you demand. So instead you're stuck coming up with all sorts of workarounds and side stories and fluff pieces that make it look like you're reporting when you're really just stalling