Court Coverage

The Chronicle has dispatched sports columnist Bruce Jenkins to New York this week to cover the U.S. Open. That gives the newspaper a presence at the final Grand Slam tennis event of the year, joining an estimated 14 kajillion other news outlets. That also means the paper has one more writer walking the grounds of the USTA National Tennis Center than it has on the ground in Baghdad.

Or, at least, that's what can be deduced from a cursory review of the Chron's online archive for articles that mentioned "Iraq" in August — the paper relied on the Associated Press for its war coverage. And so, a question: With the paper imitating the steel industry circa 1981, lopping off a quarter of its workforce the past few weeks, does it really need to fly a columnist across the country to write about ... tennis?

Damn straight it does — if you ask Jenkins.

"I think major newspapers take pride in ... sending their own people to big events," the veteran Chron scribe says via e-mail. Jenkins credits sports editor Glenn Schwarz with maintaining the paper's national profile "while suffering massive budget cuts and layoffs back home." (Schwarz couldn't be reached for comment.)

But another cursory review — this of Ghost Word, a blog that names staffers who recently left the paper — suggests the sports department sustained fewer budget casualties than the rest of the newsroom. Schwarz lost three reporters. Meanwhile, the news, business, and features sections hemorrhaged a combined 28 reporters and columnists, including Anna Badkhen, the paper's erstwhile Iraq correspondent.

No one on the news side of journalism favors less coverage of anything, whether sports or wars. But given the cutbacks, it's fair to wonder why, for example, the Chron sent Nancy Gay and Ray Ratto to hang out in Miami to write about this year's Super Bowl when neither the Niners nor the Raiders were involved. Their stories, offering few details that differed from wire articles on the game, bear the symptoms of that age-old media malady, the herd mentality.

"There's still that tendency to duplicate coverage," says one former Chron editor, "and I'm not sure that's the best way to use your resources when you're trying to survive."

For his part, Jenkins, aware of the budget squeeze, intends to pick up much of the tab for his New York jaunt. So far, no one appears willing to do likewise to go to Iraq.