Wednesday was a difficult day for The American Independent News Network, which is the larger entity that operates The Iowa Independent. Our chief executive and founder announced two of our sister sites would close and their content would be moved to The American Independent.
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The Iowa Senate will remain under the control of a slim 26-25 Democratic majority when it reconvenes in January 2012.
Dave Price is a relatively new addition to the political reporting scene in Iowa. Still, he and WHO-TV in Des Moines seem to have carved out a niche that none of the other Des Moines stations has found in a beat reporter: a TV journalist who almost exclusively covers politics.
“Someone who works for local TV hardly ever covers a beat 100 percent,” Price said in a telephone interview with Iowa Independent on Thursday. Price said he and his station consider a full-time political beat an advantage over competitors.
Price has been with WHO-TV for almost 6 1/2 years. During the last four years or so, he has seen his political beat expand. Covering presidential candidates and their campaigns in Iowa of late has become his daily job.
Price hails from Belleville, Ill., a suburb of St. Louis, Mo., and home to about 45,000 people. After attending college at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, he worked in radio for a few years before going back to school at the University of Missouri Columbia to receive his master’s degree in communications. After working in a few different cities, Price decided to move back to the Midwest and took a job with WHO-TV (Channel 13).
Although Price honed his reporting skills and interest in politics during his time in Columbia and when he worked in Montgomery, Ala., he still believes that reporting on politics can be especially arduous in the broadcast format.
“It isn’t necessarily fun for people to cover,” Price said. “It isn’t an easy beat to do, whereas some things might be easier like standing in front of a burning building describing the scene.”
The beat not only is challenging in and of itself but it’s also hard to make it work for TV, he said.
“It is especially challenging for television. It is especially numbers-driven. The details are hard to show in video,” Price explained. “We try to tell the story differently so it’s a bit more visual than usual.”
Comparing print, television and radio reporting highlights the other challenges of Price’s job.
“TV also tends to be the most time-intensive medium of the three,” he said. “Melding video and audio together, there just isn’t enough time to do it.”
Covering politics in Iowa has given Price a lot of memorable experiences and big stories. Former Gov. Tom Vilsack’s presidential run would have been his biggest — and most memorable — story if the campaign hadn’t been so short, he said. Instead he chose a more widely known event as the biggest story he’s covered.
“The Dean scream is the number one story that sticks out at me since I was there,” Price said. “We got to choose who we were going to cover early on. I thought it was going to be a big night for him but little did I know it would be for different reasons.”
Price has taken his political reporting beyond TV and into a blog as well. He finds his “Price of Politics” blog time-consuming, and admits it’s challenging to do his day job and engage with the new medium. Beyond writing his own blog, Price regularly checks out internet political features like MSNBC’s First Read, ABC News’ The Note, Politico, Kay Henderson’s Radio Iowa blog, the Des Moines Register’s columns and blogs by David Yepsen, and Lee Newspapers’ columns and blog by Todd Dorman.
Iowa Independent asked Price to offer some predictions about the caucuses but he declined, saying he doesn’t do predictions. Instead he offered some insights on the Democratic and Republican candidates’ campaigns in Iowa.
“On the Republican side I’ve been surprised by [John] McCain’s fall,” Price said, referring to the Arizona senator’s beleaguered national and Iowa campaign. “Early on he was considered by the insiders as the front-runner and that he’d win. You’d be hard-pressed to find a lot of people who witnessed the implosion and didn’t think it was surprising.”
The Ames Straw Poll, the Iowa GOP’s regular caucus fund-raiser, is coming up in a little more than three weeks. Price said that Romney appears to be the favorite.
“He would have the most to lose if he doesn’t win it,” he said.
Price was looking forward to covering a “true battle royale” of candidates at the straw poll, and is disappointed that major contenders McCain and former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani have decided to skip the poll.
On the Democratic side, Price said it was expected that the competing campaigns of former Sen. John Edwards and Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton would be exciting. New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson has emerged clinging on the “fourth rung” of the top candidates’ ladder, he said, while Delaware Sen. Joe Biden and Connecticut Sen. Chris Dodd just haven’t caught on.
Even though Dodd has spent money on ads and traveled to Iowa a lot, Price said, the candidate is “really going to have to catch fire to get on” the top tier in Iowa.
Note: Iowa Independent has interviewed two other Iowa political journalists as well. You can find our interview with David Yepsen here and our interview with Kay Henderson here.
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