In the old newspaper days, the heart of the newspaper was beat reporters. These reporters would be specialists in one part of town, such as the police, the courts, local politics, and sports. If you were a good writer and could stay off the sauce, you might get a column, where you could both report and express an opinion based on your years of experience.
If that newspaper tradition ever existed at the D&C, and
my read of Smugtown makes me doubt it, it is certainly dead today. The only D&C beat populated by long-time reporters is sports. Every other area is serviced by a quickly changing group of writers who will soon be moving on to better assignments in the Gannett chain.
Politics, a beat which cries out for a long-term team of reporters, has one beat writer. Joe Spector had that job
since late 2000. He's since moved on to the Gannett Albany beat, taking all of his experience with him. Spector's replacement, Jill Terreri, covered politics for the Niagara Gazette until moving to the D&C this year. She has her hands full as the only reporter writing about politics at a paper that covers four congressional districts, a dozen or so state legislators, a large municipal and county government, and numerous suburban governments.
The drawback of revolving door beat reporters is obvious: if you
haven't been in the job for a long time, you don't know the history of
the beat you're covering, and you're a sap for politicians who have
been around forever (like most of them in Rochester). Every old trick
is a new trick when you're a newcomer.
Because the D&C doesn't keep its beat reporters, and since it's hard to be a good columnist without knowing the city inside and out, the D&C doesn't have many columnists. The D&C's
columnist roster is deceptively large, since many of them are tied to suburban communities and write only on local issues. The few generalists write mainly human interest stories. Their rare ventures into politics are usually pegged on examples from the community. For example,
Mark Hare is currently focusing on inner-city violence. Of his last 6 columns, only
one fails to put a local resident front and center.
Gannett is willing to spend millions on RocMen, the Insider, herRochester, RocMoms, and ConXion, not to mention the "living" sections in the D&C. But they're not willing to spend a tiny fraction of that to add a couple more beat reporters or columnists to cover real news. This, beyond any other issue, contributes to the low quality of Rochester's only daily paper.