FLORIDA: 'Usual Question'
by Paul Tash, editor and president, the St. Petersburg Times

Our food writer, attending a journalism convention, sat on a bus next to her counterpart from a news organization that likes to think of itself as a national newspaper. After the perfunctory introductions, my colleague got the question that we have come to anticipate under such circumstances:

Is there anything interesting to write about out there?

Somehow we manage. Along with hundreds of other newspapers outside New York (and those other cities that envy it), we demonstrate every day that there is abundant and interesting life beyond The Center of the Universe.

Of course, there are good stories in New York and environs, and the rest of us count on the truly national news organizations to cover them well.

But interesting and important though they are, those stories are not going to be the main course on the news menu we offer our readers. At the St. Pete Times, we want to look out on the world from the vantage of our readers, and there's a lot of territory between here and New York (or Washington, or Los Angeles).

That balance of interests suggests a couple of important points -- one for the crews dense-packed into the news capitals, and the other for those of us stretched out along the journalistic zone of defense that is supposed to cover the rest of the country.

For the first group: come out from the places you typically cover and you'll find some really good stories.

For the rest of us, we must remember not to rely too heavily on coverage from places that produce lots of datelines. The AP and the supplemental wire services spill out enough copy and pictures every day to fill our columns, if we wanted, but our readers could get that stuff somewhere else.

What they can't get elsewhere is the distinctive story, nicely crafted, about the state legislator who is battling depression even as she battles a campaign opponent, about the state attorney who shot himself in the midst of questions about his finances, about the drought that is not only wilting the flowers that give Florida its name but draining the reservoirs that newcomers need to supply their new developments.

The bigger danger to journalism is not the concentration of media in New York and a few other cities.

What's more serious is the potential erosion of newsgathering firepower in places where reporters are not already stacked two and three deep. It's difficult and expensive to maintain a group of talented journalists to cover a community well -- much more expensive than falling back on the wires.

Paul Tash started at the St. Petersburg Times in 1978. He is on the board of the American Society of Newspaper Editors and a director of the Committee to Protect Journalists.