States News Service

States News Service was a news agency that operated from 1973 to 2004. Run by Leland J. Schwartz (b. 1949), the agency provided coverage of Washington, D.C., and the federal government for regional newspapers without their own D.C. bureaus. Later it expanded into the document retrieval business and an "hourly newspaper" called The Latest News.

States News Service's strategy was to concentrate on the local angles of national stories. Examples of these kinds of stories were described in a 1978 profile:

For instance, the C.I.A. program to test the behavior of people who had taken LSD was a national story, but the fact that part of it was undertaken at Rutgers University was the more important page one news for The Newark Star Ledger and The New Brunswick Home News.

The reporters keep in touch with staff members in various Federal agencies for news of interest to localities. In one case, a reporter learned from staff members at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission that a mysterious "green grunge" had developed in some nuclear plants, posing a potential danger of leakage of radioactive material. This made good copy in Connecticut, where two of these reactors are situated.

And while the closing of 14 rural post offices in the Erie, Pa., postal section did not make much of a national splash, it was front page news for the Erie Morning News.

States News Service was also valued for its coverage of local members of Congress, "their general performance and how they are voting. This is particularly important because many papers around the country have tended to take Congressional press releases ... and reprint them as news without doing any hard reporting on them."

In 1978, client papers were charged between "$75 to $300 a week, based on circulation and need." In 1993, States' rates were from $50 to $800 a week per client. In either case, this was much less expensive than the cost of a single salaried Washington-based reporter. Most States News Service reporters were "hungry" — just starting out in the field, and willing to work long hours. Subscribing newspaper editors were generally pleased with the coverage they got, though some complained about the fluctuating quality of the writing and reporting.

States News Service was co-founded by Leland Schwartz, a native of Greenwich, Connecticut, and a former reporter for the New Haven Journal-Courier and a news assistant at The New York Times. In 1973, while serving as a press release writer on Capitol Hill for Connecticut Senator Lowell Weicker, he observed that Connecticut newspapers were routinely publishing his handouts as news stories without substantial alteration.