Facing the worst economic crisis in generations and an unpopular war in Iraq, President Barack Obama arrived in Washington shattering racial barriers and promising momentous change in the way the United States conducts itself at home and abroad. Reporters from around the globe have descended on the nation’s capital to document the unfolding historic drama.

American newspapers, meanwhile, are pulling their correspondents out.

Wracked by declining readership and advertising revenues, daily papers in every major American city have scaled back their Washington bureaus or closed them altogether. It is the latest sign of a decade-long financial skid in the American news industry, where austerity measures have become commonplace.

But as Washington correspondents vanish, troubling questions arise. If Thomas Jefferson was right that “a well-informed citizenry” is necessary for a healthy democracy, what happens when the American public is unaware of their elected officials’ work in Washington? Could the result be pay-to-play journalism, where information is increasingly available only to those able and willing to pay top dollar for it?

Brian McGrory ’84, metro editor at The Boston Globe and the paper’s former White House correspondent, explains the watchdog role of Washington-based reporters.

“Residents elect people to represent them in Washington, so we don’t want those politicians going off and forgetting where they came from,” he says. “We ought to keep close tabs on how they are spending their campaign money, who is giving them contributions, and whether they are fulfilling their campaign promises. To pull out of Washington and leave these guys uncovered would be a travesty.”

Yet few newspapers have been spared from the current cutbacks. The Newark, N.J., Star-Ledger, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and the San Diego Union-Tribune have pulled their reporters out of Washington. Cox Newspapers, which had 30 people in its Washington bureau including correspondents for The Austin (Texas) American-Statesmanand The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, announced it will close its D.C. operation in April.

The Tribune company, which filed for bankruptcy protection last year, combined the Washington bureaus of the Chicago Tribune, the Baltimore Sun and the Los Angeles Times, cutting in half a staff of what had been 70 people only a year ago. The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post even reduced the width of their papers to save money on newsprint.

My own former employer, The Times-Picayune of New Orleans, is keeping a two-person Washington operation intact even as its owner, the publishing giant Newhouse, closed its D.C. bureau in November.

To save money, newspapers fill their pages with stories from subscription wire services such as The Associated Press and Reuters. Yet wire services are designed to get news out broadly, not explain what a new federal budget means for public education, environmental protection, or police capabilities in, say, Lewiston.

“If you look at newspapers today, they are mostly wire stories that are national or international,” says Jeremy Pelofsky ’97, who covers Congress for Reuters. “You have to wonder if the interests of a city are being served by a wire report. And that’s coming from a wire reporter!”

The result of newspaper cutbacks will not be a news blackout, however. Quite the opposite. News of the Obama presidency and the work of the 111th Congress will explode out of Washington in such overwhelming volume that it will be impossible for all but the most dedicated hermits to ignore.

What will be lost is context and meaning. The main task of Washington correspondents has always been to stand at the center of power, politics, and policy and tell the folks back home what it all means to them. At their best, Washington correspondents aren’t merely reporters, but explainers, experts who “understand how the system works in D.C. and can apply that understanding to the issues and the political players most relevant to readers back home,” says Carolyn Ryan ’86, deputy metro editor at The New York Times.

Those explainers are the people who are losing their jobs.

At this writing, President Obama is talking about kick-starting the economy with a public works building spree reminiscent of FDR’s. It is a Washington correspondent’s job to find out which bridge and road projects back home will get green-lighted — and which won’t. It also falls to the Washington correspondent to see if the money is being disbursed equitably, what role politics is playing, and whether someone’s brother-in-law is getting a sweetheart deal to do the paving.

The value of a Washington bureau was never more evident to me than after Hurricane Katrina, in August 2005. With The Times-Picayune‘s downtown New Orleans offices flooded and abandoned, it fell to the Washington bureau to collect stories from reporters in the field and post them on the newspaper’s Web site. After the storm, the Washington bureau was also charged with tracking what Congress and the Bush administration were doing — and not doing — to aid in the recovery and the awesome task of rebuilding a major American city.

Former newspaper journalist Bill Walsh ’86 is now a senior strategic adviser for AARP in Washington, D.C.

Les Campbell, a leading expert on the development of democracy, visits Bates College to speak about the necessity and difficulty of building democracies in the Middle East at 8 p.m. Wednesday, March 21, in the Edmund S. Muskie Archives, 70 Campus Ave.

Sponsored by the Bates Democrats, the event is open to the public at no charge.

Campbell’s speech will touch on high-profile democracy-building efforts, including the controversial democratization process in Iraq.

Campbell is a senior associate and regional director for the Middle East and North Africa at the Washington D.C.-based National Democratic Institute for International Affairs, where he has directed the Institute’s democratic development programs in those regions since 1996.

Campbell has overseen the expansion of NDI’s programs in the Middle East with the establishment of 10 permanent offices that furnish assistance with political, civic and governance reform and development throughout the Arab world. In addition, he has organized election-observation missions around the region, and provided training in the skills necessary for political candidates, government officials and voters to participate in democratic life.

A frequent guest and commentator on Middle East issues for major broadcast news outlets, including CNN, ABC, PBS’s NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, Fox News and several international organizations, Campbell is quoted regularly in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Canada’s Globe and Mail, the Toronto Star and many other publications.

Campbell has also been a guest speaker and/or lecturer at American University, Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, Georgetown University, the University of Toronto, and several chapters of the World Affairs Council. He has been a member of task forces and study groups at the Council on Foreign Relations; the School of Advanced International Studies; the United States Institute of Peace; and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, among others.

Campbell is a fellow at the Queen’s University Center for the Study of Democracy and sits on the board of directors of the Institute for Media, Policy and Civil Society, based in Vancouver, British Columbia. Before joining NDI in 1994, he was chief of staff to the leader of the New Democratic Party in the Canadian House of Commons.

Campbell earned a master’s degree in public administration from Harvard University and a B.A. with honors from the University of Manitoba.