Power, politics and the press--a look back: the dean of the Texas Capitol press reflects on what it was like when the media referred to the government as "we" rather than "they.".

AUSTIN, Texas -- I reported on my first session of the Texas Legislature in 1963, for The Daily Texan, the student newspaper at The University of Texas at Austin. I'm now the dean of the Texas Capitol press corps. I can tell you that us veteran press corps reporters have seen a lot of changes since the 1960s, in technology, openness and demeanor.

Back then, Texas and many other states did a lot in secret. Appropriations bills the size of the New York phonebook were drafted behind closed doors, and dropped on legislators' desks at the end of the 140-day session, with just a few hours to figure out what was in them--and what wasn't.

Lobbyists had a huge influence on who became House speaker. They wrote most bills, and could affect legislation with a top-down phone call from a posh watering hole.

In an environment where relationships are everything, green reporters like me had trouble finding out what was going on. Those reporters in the know were veterans who'd built up years of trust not just with legislators, but also with lobbyists. Many were from the generation that had been through World War II, who referred to the government as "we" rather than "they." Some reporters became press secretaries for governors and then cycled back into the press corps.

We wrote on manual typewriters and punched our stories into teletype machines to get them to our home offices. Television was still young; most people got their state government information from newspapers.

In what I call "the pre-ethics days," before stricter lines were drawn between legislators, lobbyists and reporters, senior legislators had parking places on the Capitol grounds, and offices in the Capitol. So did the press. The University of Texas gave football tickets to legislators--and reporters. Movie lobbyists gave free passes to both groups. At Christmas, the liquor lobby gave a couple bottles of whiskey to each legislator--and each reporter.

And not just in Texas. David Ammons, who heads the Associated Press bureau in Washington, recalls what reporters were like when he arrived in Olympia in 1971: "The old guard, mostly crusty, hard-drinkin', blue-collar types, who cussed a lot, were cozy with their sources, and wore bias on their sleeve. I was appalled when lobbyists would pull up and distribute bottles of booze from their car trunks at Christmastime."

Ammons, now 57, says he initially "took on a purer-than-thou attitude, which was somewhat self-defeating, refusing to fraternize with any sources and ignoring both lobbyists and staffers, assuming their 'spin' would pollute me." The Watergate-era wariness of the powerful also added to his youthful skepticism or cynicism. Eventually, he says, he loosened up a bit, realizing that he needed a broad array of sources, and could trust himself to weigh and test what they were telling him, and realizing that countervailing points of view were all around. "So I learned 'trust, but verify,'" he says.

SCANDAL BRINGS CHANGE

The Watergate cover-up closely followed the rising furor over the Vietnam War. Together they helped produce a suspicion of government that was reflected in political and legislative reporting.

In Texas, another factor that helped chill the cozy atmosphere among lobbyists, legislators and newspapers was the Sharpstown banking and stock fraud scandal. A federal investigation was announced in 1971, with revelations that a Houston banker and developer had greased the skids for banking insurance legislation he wanted with quick-profit stock deals for key officials. The 1972 elections, aided by a court-ordered change from at-large to single-member House districts in major urban counties, brought a wholesale turnover. Half the House and Senate were freshmen in 1973, and the top five elected officials were all switched out. And there was a leap in diversity of race and party in the once solidly white, Democratic Texas Legislature.

That came to be called the "Reform Session," when new laws for open meetings and records, campaign finance disclosure and lobby registration were passed. Suddenly things were different.

The newer reporters, many fresh from college campuses that were hotbeds of unrest over Vietnam--and of whom an increasing number were women as barriers to their participation fell--had their senses further heightened by Watergate. Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein brought down President Richard Nixon. The new journalists were more likely to refer to the government as "they" than "we."

Jeff Schapiro, 51, has covered Virginia's General Assembly since 1980 and heads up the Richmond Times-Dispatch bureau. He says the switch to single-member districts in his state created "many more centers of power," which allowed more diverse sources for news than before.

As for lobby largesse and free offices in the Capitol, those went out in Texas in the 1970s. Scott Carpenter, then bureau chief for the Harte-Hanks chain (and son of Liz Carpenter, press secretary to Lady Bird Johnson), began to argue that news organizations should pay their own way to avoid favoritism charges. The freebies fell off measurably as more newspaper organizations paid for offices and parking spaces, meals and travel covering political campaigns.

A FOCUS ON LOBBYISTS

In Florida, Lucy Morgan made lobbyists a big part of her focus. Morgan, now 65, was the bureau chief for the St. Petersburg Times for two decades until becoming a senior correspondent in January.

Morgan, who knows about gathering sensitive information--she shared in a Pulitzer prize for taking out a corrupt sheriff in 1985, just before becoming Capitol bureau chief--says she assigned "my other reporters to cover each house while I spent time cultivating sources and stories among the lobbyists, who always know more about what is going on than the lawmakers."

Conduct counts too, Morgan says. "My advice to young reporters always includes an admonition to be nice: Ask, don't demand information. Too many of us are arrogant and demanding."

Newspapers today no longer can count on the Associated Press and United Press International as a backup, Morgan says.

"We probably do more daily stories these days because of the decline and fall of the wire services," she says. "We once could depend on them for the routine stuff but now they only want to do the top stories of the day. So if we think it's important to our readers, we have to do the stories."

AP's Ammons agrees the wire service role has changed "from the process-oriented, turn-of-the-screw daily stories to more emphasis on Big Picture stories and advance setups on the major issues and faces. It's much more value-added, explanatory journalism, assuming that lots of readers already know the basics from the 24-hour news cycle and websites and ... the rise of news-oriented 'hot talk' radio and blogs."

Although the number of newspapers has declined--most major cities are now down to one daily general circulation newspaper--the number of news outlets available is probably larger. Austin has home delivery of not only the Houston Chronicle, Dallas News and San Antonio Express-News, but also of The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. The Washington Post and other newspapers are available online. In addition to a burgeoning number of television outlets--although fewer Capitol TV reporters--there are all kinds of specialty magazines and online services. And there are C-SPAN-type programs, gavel-to-gavel coverage, and now even streaming video and audio of floor action and committee meetings over legislative websites.

Schapiro and Ammons both participate in TV and radio shows about their legislatures and politics. Morgan has become such a fixture in the Florida Capitol that in 2005, the Florida Senate named its press gallery for her.

NOW THERE ARE BLOGS

The blogs--that's short for "weblogs"--are the latest outgrowth of the trend a couple of decades ago for newspapers to give up being organs of record. In Texas, a veteran Dallas News Capitol reporter, Sam Kinch Jr., saw a niche for providing the nitty-gritty and gossip to a select audience of lawmakers, lobbyists and political junkies that newspapers were leaving behind.

Kinch, with George Phenix and the late John Rogers, founded Texas Weekly in 1984. Two decades later, it is still going strong, taken over seamlessly in 1998 by Ross Ramsey, a veteran reporter for The Dallas Times-Herald and then The Houston Chronicle. Though initially a print publication, and later available by fax, Texas Weekly joined the shift to the Internet and now is available only online.

The Quorum Report, run by Harvey Kronberg, provides breaking news, with several "Daily Buzz" items every day about legislative actions and politics. Kronberg often sacrifices accuracy for speed, and frequently corrects items.

Blogs have developed enough presence that Texas Weekly recently put former reporter and legislative staffer Robyn Hadley to work periodically describing what's hot in the Texas blogosphere.

While the blogs can be irreverent, irrelevant, entertaining, opinionated and obscene, and sometimes informative, longtime reporters note them with several grains of salt. Some actually break news, but some only put their own spin on information obtained from the traditional news media.

Not to be left out, a growing number of legislators have their own websites and blogs, where they can report directly to their constituents.

Ammons says technological change has made news coverage "much more sophisticated and smart. Internet-based research and computer-assisted reporting, easy access to experts and interest groups, and even spell-check, all have improved the process immensely," he says.

And the switch to computers and the Internet opened up a whole new world.

"When I first arrived, I 'punched' my stories live and unedited to the state wire using teletype perforated tape," Ammons says. "Photos were shot and printed the old-fashioned way and sent via a phone line as a beam of light played across a rotating drum. Fax-style machines, using copy composed on huge-font manual typewriters, came next. Eventually, of course, we got a series of computers, software upgrades, Laserphotos, and so forth. Today, we're heading digital and multiplatform, starting to think about video, audio and still-photo galleries."

And today's Capitol reporters in Texas can file stories (or check email) via wireless Internet from the House and Senate floor, and even send photos. An editor or source can call a reporter's vibrating cell phone, or send a message to the phone/e-mail gizmo on their belt or in their purse.

Things indeed have changed. But people like Lucy Morgan and me, even though we're on Medicare, continue to think our understanding of the people and issues in these complex Capitols is important enough for the public that we'll keep doing it.

"I cannot count the times that our coverage has led to a citizen uproar that changed the direction state government was moving," Morgan says. Her favorite was catching a car rental company that had buried a provision on page 86 of a bill, freeing the company from fees to airports. It would have cost Miami $10 million, and other cities as much as $4 million. When the airport managers were in the front row when it came up a second time, it died--and the lobbyists lost a $1 million fee.

AP's Ammons is upbeat about the state of state Capitol journalism.

"Despite the hand-wringing about newspaper circulation dropping and consumers' attention being divided so much, I remain fairly optimistic about public interest in, and concern for, good journalism," Ammons says.

"Plus politics and government are fun, at least for some of us. I still love coming to work in the morning, not knowing quite what I'll face or what next week's political column topic should be. Although issues recur and some of the political foodfights seem familiar, in truth each year and month and week and day is different.

"After 35 years, I'm learning new stuff every day, and still learning a lot about writing better and smarter. It's a gift to be here."

Dave McNeely, who co-taught at The University of Texas with Democratic strategist Paul Begala and Republican political guru Karl Rove, is the dean of the Texas Capitol press corps. He retired at the end of 2004 from the Austin American-Statesman after 26 years, and has hosted and appeared on hundreds of television and radio shows about government and politics. He continues to write a weekly column for 30 Texas newspapers, and is co-writing a book with Jim Henderson on the late and legendary Texas Lieutenant Governor Bob Bullock.