Washington Post Closes Three U.S. Bureaus

Less than a month after the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times each launched San Francisco editions and a week after the Times kicked off its Chicago edition (with the Journal not far behind, the Washington Post has announced it will be closing its Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York bureaus.

According to the New York Times' Bill Carter (who must be taking a Thanksgiving break from the television beat), the move is both financial and in keeping with the paper's decision that it would "cover Washington as a place to live and as a place that has impact on the nation and the world," in the words of a spokesperson. Circling the wagons in this way is almost the direct opposite approach of paper's like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, which in the last few years have been positioning themselves as national dailies. In October, the Journal became the largest circulation paper in the country.

Employees of the bureaus are being invited to move to Washington and join the Post newsroom; three assistants will be losing their jobs when the closings are complete. According to Carter, the paper has already closed its Denver and Miami bureaus.

Who will cover national stories—and international ones—when bureaus disappear is no longer as simple as saying "Get me wire!" Last week, the Associated Press laid off 90 people and closed several bureaus, including those in Jacksonville, Florida, Dayton, Ohio, and Berkley, California according to a map created by Gawker's Hamilton Nolan. Even the Journal, while reaching out to San Francisco and Chicago, recently closed its Boston bureau.

There are a few possibilities for filling the vacuum left by these closed bureaus and diminished wire services. Newspapers can tap talent overseas or rely on the new crop of nonprofit news organizations that are doing independent reporting on the local level and partnering with traditional news organizations for distribution. In fact, Chicago just got one in the form of the Chicago News Cooperative, made up of many veteran reporters who have been laid-off, bought-out, or grown sick and tired of their newspaper jobs. San Francisco has the Bay Area News Project, launching early next year. Soon enough, Norberto Santana Jr., a former investigative reporter for the Orange County Register, will be launching his nonprofit Voice of Orange County. While the missions of these nonprofit news sites might be different from the Post or AP's bureaus (it's doubtful that the Voice of OC will cover, say, the Oscars or the next high profile celebrity trial), they might be able to provide much needed on-the-ground coverage of the regions.

Another possibility—and one that will warm the hearts of new media evangelists everywhere—might be to partner with local news websites, like AOL CEO Tim Armstrong's pet project, Patch or the other hyper-local plays being underwritten by the Times, the Huffington Post, among others. There is risk, though. While the writers on these blogs are often passionate about their areas of reporting (since, in theory, they are residents of the communities they cover), part of the point of those ventures seems to be their not-quite-professional-journalist credentials: The risk is that in place of news-breaking bureaus, papers like the Post might just be getting community bulletin boards.

Nobody (except possibly local advertisers) wants that.