The decline — and rebirth — of labor coverage

Micah Utrecht of In These Times interviewed Steven Greenhouse, who recently retired from the New York Times labor beat, about his job.

Here is an excerpt:

Almost all of your fellow reporters at the New York Times covered beats that were also covered by many other reporters at many other publications nationwide. But when you retired, you were one of the only national labor reporters left. Did that feel lonely?

I started this beat in late 1995, as the metro desk labor reporter for the New York Times, and Peter Kilborn was the national labor reporter. The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, AP, Reuters all had labor reporters. It was good to have the competition—it spurred us all to do better.

After a year or two, Peter Kilborn went onto another beat and I took over both the national and metro labor beat for the Times. Beginning in the late 1990s and over the next decade or so, many news organizations went through a major consolidation and shrunk the size of their news staff, and many organizations stopped having a full-time labor reporter. It felt odd. I felt there was that much more responsibility on me to make sure that when an important tree in a forest fell, that someone—meaning me—was out there covering it.

Since I was the last man standing, all these PR folks, union folks and Human Resources folks would say, “Greenhouse, you gotta cover this! No one else is gonna cover this!” I grew up with a lot of Jewish guilt, and it was very easy for people to guilt trip me.

But over the past few years, dating from the beginning of the Great Recession, there has been a rebound in the number of labor reporters, and I think that’s to the good. It’s good to have competition—it keeps people on their toes. The Wall Street Journal has Melanie Trottman covering labor full-time, Lydia DePillis covers labor more or less full-time for the Washington Post, Alejandra Cancino covers it half-time for the Chicago Tribune, the Boston Globe and LA Times are covering it more, ProPublica did a wonderful series about temp workers, McClachy has done a terrific series about independent contractors. We’ve seen this rebound because worker issues really rose to the fore during the recession.

Read more here.