By TIM ALBERTA
April 26, 2019 Continue to article content
Tim Alberta is chief political correspondent at Politico Magazine.
Tony Leys is a newspaperman. He has covered murders. He has worked the copy desk. He has knocked on doors and taken verbal battering. Most reporters evolve to become editors, but Leys, bored behind a desk 20 years ago, did the opposite. After spending much of his career assigning stories—as city editor, state editor, politics editor—he returned to writing them. His beat became health care, and he owned it, reporting with soul-wringing realism on the flaws of the American medical apparatus. He has won numerous awards, including two years ago for reporting on the impact of Medicaid privatization, as told through the eyes of poor, suffering patients, and last year for authoring a stellar package of Sunday print edition stories about mental health.
There will be no such series this year. Not because Leys has lost his job, but because he’s being reassigned—sort of. He’ll continue to cover health-related stories. But for the next 10 months, his priority will be covering presidential politics. Leys is used to this. It happens every four years. Because this is Iowa. Because this is the Des Moines Register.
Since the dawn of the modern nominating process, no single event has done more to winnow the field of aspiring presidents than the Iowa caucuses—and no single publication has done more to capture its characters, narratives and rhythms than the Register. But the scythe of technological change and economic pressure that is killing the news industry, and especially local journalism, is coming for Iowa’s paper of record, too. There are fewer and fewer political gatekeepers like the Register these days: influential publications staffed by reporters who live among the voters they cover, understanding their lifestyles and livelihoods in ways that can’t be mimicked by their peers parachuting in from Washington or New York or Los Angeles.
It’s almost impossible to imagine the first-in-the-nation nominating contest without Iowa’s biggest newspaper. Its editorial endorsements are national news. Its front-page stories, on subjects ranging from politics to agriculture policy, demand attention from every campaign. And its celebrated statewide survey—“The Iowa Poll,” a Register tradition since 1943—is met with nearly as much anticipation and external media hype in the political world as the caucus results themselves. “When I land at DSM,” says Jonathan Martin, national political reporter for the New York Times, “the first thing I do is pick up the Register.”
When Leys was first asked to “pinch-hit” during the 2004 cycle—filling in for political reporters, when asked, to write about Democratic candidates—he was thrilled. Any journalist who comes to Iowa pines to cover the caucuses, and Leys, who had been with the Register since 1988, was finally getting his shot. He felt fortunate whenever called upon, unsure how often the opportunity would present itself. The next time around, however, in 2008, Leys was pulled into political coverage more frequently. Then, in 2012, he became something of a hybrid, devoting nearly as much time to reporting on elections as he did health care. By the 2016 cycle, Leys was a full-time political correspondent, finding time to cover his regular beat when the presidential churn paused or when a major health-related story demanded it.
When Tony Leys, above, was first asked to help with caucus coverage, he was only called on to pinch-hit occasionally. Today, he is one of several reporters at the Des Moines Register who covers a regular non-election beat and moonlights as a political correspondent. | KC McGinnis for Politico Magazine
Today, with the 2020 Democratic caucuses already in full swing—20 declared candidates marauding across the state, and several more soon to join them—Leys can only chuckle at the quaintness of those old days. Fourteen reporters at the Register are currently assigned to Democratic candidates, responsible for tracking their every move and covering their every stop in the state, but only three of them are practiced political journalists. The paper’s business reporter is covering Bernie Sanders; its agriculture reporter is responsible for keeping tabs on not-yet-declared Montana Governor Steve Bullock; its metro reporter is assigned to the long-shot Maryland Congressman John Delaney, who has all but lived in Iowa for the past two years...
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