That's pretty much everyone in the press corps these days. You could probably fit them all in a VW microbus, with room to spare.

Here’s an interesting shot that illustrates the current state of things in Olympia. Monday was a slow news day, with not a darn thing happening at the Capitol — in other words, pretty much exactly like every other day during the Legislature’s three-week-old special session. So when Attorney General Rob McKenna called a news conference to announce the release of a “white paper” on the budget, every statehouse reporter showed up.

Forget the news element — it’s the last part that counts here.  The folks you see with the notebooks and the microphones represent the entirety of the Capitol press corps. Well, except for the Washington State Wire reporter snapping the picture, and a TV cameraman who is cropped out of the frame. Actually, the fellow standing with his back to the camera, nearest to McKenna, holding a video recorder, isn’t a reporter at all — that’s Zack Smith, tracker for the state Democratic Party.

Gov. Booth Gardner faces the assembled Olympia press corps in 1987. Crowds like this one once were commonplace.

And it just g0es to illustrate the shrinking number of reporters who cover Olympia these days. Some 20 years ago, the state’s leading newspapers typically had two or three-person bureaus. The Associated Press had three full-timers and usually a session temp. Smaller papers that couldn’t afford a full-time staffer usually sent their own correspondents to Olympia during sessions. It’s a little hard measuring the decline in precise numbers, because 20 years ago not all the reporters with press credentials covered the statehouse every day, nor do they today. And the ranks swelled of course during sessions, dwindled when news was thin. But the number who covered the statehouse on a daily basis was about three times what it is now.

By way of comparison, Washington State Wire presents a couple of historic shots — not awfully historic, by any means. In one, Gov. Booth Gardner faces the assembled press corps of 1987. Among those you don’t see in this shot is Washington State Wire’s Erik Smith, who was an intern that session for the University of Washington Daily and a stringer for the Aberdeen Daily World. That’s because space was short at the press table, and interns were excluded.

Here’s another of the Senate press table in 1990. When the debates got interesting, darn near everyone turned out, latecomers were forced to watch from the wings, and the rule was that if one publication had two reporters at the table and someone from another paper needed a seat, one of them had to leave.

The Senate press table in 1990. Left to right, that's Jim Simon of the Seattle Times, Bobbi Ulrich of the (Portland) Oregonian, Mark Matassa of the Seattle Times, Mike Prager of the Spokesman-Review, Mark Funk of the (Everett) Herald, Peter Callaghan of the (Tacoma) Morning News Tribune, and Ed Penhale and Neil Modie of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. These were about half of the newspaper reporters who were present that session, among them Washington State Wire's Erik Smith, then of the Tri-City Herald, and who apparently couldn't get a seat at the table that day. It also doesn't count the press interns or broadcast media reporters.

It has been years since anyone worried about that rule. As the ranks of reporters at the statehouse have declined, so has the volume of news copy. There isn’t as much competition for “scoops,” either, now that the print edition of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer is gone, and the three major Puget Sound newspapers under the McClatchy umbrella — The Olympian, the News Tribune in Tacoma and the Seattle Times — make up for short staffing by sharing news copy.

But there is one saving grace. There’s never a problem finding a seat.

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