Covering the Home Team
So Warren asked reporter Glen Elsasser, who’d written the bulldog story Friday night with William Neikirk, to come back to the bureau Saturday and make some more calls. For the final edition the article became “Intellect, quiet manner characterize Breyer,” a graceful examination of the nominee’s personal and judicial history, and the politics behind the appointment dropped to the bottom of it. When we talked to Warren this week and asked him what’s changed in the five months he’s been running the Washington bureau, the Breyer article was one of the things he pointed to.
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“One of the problems here is there has been no clear mission,” he told us. “I think to the extent there’s been a de facto mission, it’s been aping what the New York Times and Wall Street Journal do here. We can’t let that be the mission anymore for a lot of reasons. You can raise the question how interested our readers are in a lot of this inside Washington process stuff. Who’s up? Who’s down? Secondly, we don’t have the people. They have three times as many people. We can’t have someone covering every fucking agency.”
Warren’s finally made a few beat changes. The most significant move was to pull Mitchell Locin out of the White House and give him a Sunday column called “D.C. Journal.” Locin’s beat is what Warren calls the “home team,” the delegation. “He’s been really, really professional,” Warren said, when we asked how Locin took it. “I think on one level this was kind of wrenching for him.” No doubt. “It’s an opportunity to write a column,” said Locin glumly.
Warren takes this approach to his own Sunday column, which gleefully chronicles the herd instincts and suck-up reflexes of the local press corps. Because the Tribune isn’t read in Washington, his “Sunday Watch” hasn’t turned him into an important local villain–or hero. But he has been noticed. There was a Newsweek item that–quoting Hot Type–had the new bureau chief saying, “I have no desire to be there in five or ten years as part of the Gridiron Show, prancing around onstage, singing to the president, or whatever the fuck they do.” This month the American Journalism Review finds Warren excoriating the “mix of sophistry and fervent self-righteousness” that allows the “reporter-pundit class” to make big bucks making speeches to partisan audiences.
“My boss insisted I come as the Tribune bureau chief,” he said. “It was very enlightening. It just sort of fit–it just fit the stereotype I had of all these people sucking up to people they cover.
“All I care about are the kind of stories that talk about Chicago and Illinois and the area, stories that may be of interest to readers that they can’t get anywhere else,” bureau chief Lynn Sweet told us. Like Warren, she pointed to a story in last Sunday’s paper.
