Reporting on Reporting from Washington

Now we have to admit a certain level of dorkiness and nerdiness when it comes to history. After all we were jealous of a college friend last year who spent three months last fall traveling among Civil War battlefields. We’re especially suckers for journalism history: Russell Baker’s “Growing Up” first planted the desire to be a foreign correspondent, and it’s hard to come away from “The Boys on the Bus” wanting to be anything but a political reporter.

Hence Donald Ritchie’s new book, “Reporting from Washington: The History of the Washington Press Corps,” is a real treat. In his sweeping new tome, Ritchie, the associate historian of the Senate, picks up in the early 1900s, where his last work, “The Press Gallery,” left off. Making the same point we laid out when we launched Fishbowl, his first sentence explains, “Washington, D.C., is a reporter’s town.”

Over the course of some 270-some-oddly compelling pages, he proceeds to tell the reader everything one could conceivably want to know about practicing journalism in a city where there are 5 journalists for every elected official. While technically focused on the nation’s capitol, his book more broadly tells the evolution of the news industry, including the major newspapers, wire services, the witch hunts, and he masterfully explores the arrival and (very) grudging eventual acceptance of radio, television, women, and minority reporters over many decades.

While it will be tempting to give the book the ole Washington read, after all, it mentions nearly every major reporter of the last 80 years (sorry Nagourney, you’re still too young to merit the historical treatment), just about any page offers a compelling anecdote or the origins of a old Washington tradition.

The staff of the D.C. bureau of the NY Times will be happy to know that their predecessors have been complaining about the “desk” in New York since at least the 1930s, and Mark Silva might despair knowing that the Tribune was once regarded in Washington as the nation’s “least fair and reliable” paper.

Show bookers at the cable channels might like to know that the origin of car service to and from studios for guests originated at the birth of radio when the medium was so poorly regarded that many guests would simply skip their segments unless physically picked up and deposited at the studios.

Washington Post writers and alums from the Star will eat up the chapter on the hometown papers, just as the television channels and networks will love the chapter on the arrival and growth of their medium.

In his closing chapters of the book, which took him nearly twenty years to research and write, Ritchie also lays out the challenges facing the Washington pres corps in an age where no one can really define who is and who is not a journalist.

In all of the spare time that Washington journalists have, pick this book up and read about where the craft came from and where it’s going. In fact, if you have even the slightest interest in the journalism industry, check this book out–it is worth a few hours of your time.

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