REPORTING Confusion at City Hall

At 73, Cincinnati Post & Times-Star Reporter Charles Rentrop can more than keep up with his youngest competitor. He has been covering city hall since 1944, and there are those who claim he is the most influential man in the building. At meetings of the city council, he sits beside the mayor; and when the mayor is confused about something, Rentrop straightens him out. With an unfailing memory for names, dates and bills, Rentrop often corrects the council in debate, objecting that some proposal has already been enacted or is patently illegal. In the paper's city room, the only complaint is that he gives too many facts when he phones in his story.

Yet even Charlie Rentrop cannot keep up with the flood of news in today's big city. For all his versatility, Rentrop's kind of one-man coverage of city hall is fast disappearing. The Post & Times-Star now assigns additional reporters to cover city news, and papers elsewhere are enlarging their staffs to cope with increasing urban change: soaring population, urban sprawl, federal programs that touch all aspects of city life. "Before, you could just sit in the mayor's office and find out all you needed to know," says Wayne Whitt, the Nashville Tennessean's top city hall reporter. "Now the mayor is often trying to find out what is going on himself."

Seeing the Merging. To make sense out of this confusion requires a new kind of reporter. "You just can't have the old guy who has been knocking on doors for 20 years," says Davis Merritt, city editor of the Charlotte Observer. "You need a man versed in public affairs who can see the process of merging and growing."

Some newspapers have sent staffers to schools.and conferences to bone up on the intricacies of city government; others have assigned reporters permanently to their city's urban renewal and anti-poverty programs. The Richmond Times-Dispatch is training reporters not to stick to a particular city beat but to move with ease from city to surrounding counties; its energetic city hall reporter, Ed Grimsley, roams the U.S. as well as Canada in search of novel solutions to city problems. The Milwaukee Journal runs a fat Sunday section, Home, which covers all facets of the city building boom; many of its stories spill over into the news sections of the paper. The Philadelphia Bulletin recently ran an eight-part series, "The Movers and Shakers," by Political Reporter John McCullough, who spent three months tracking down the true business and professional powers in the city.

Covering the Obvious. But in the majority of cases, newspapers are not doing nearly so well as they should on the city beat. "We ought to strike off in new directions," says Lloyd Wendt, editor of Chicago's American, and a onetime city hall reporter. "Unfortunately, we're usually kept so busy following the old traditions that it's hard to get the time and people to do anything else." The old tradition consists of covering the obvious story -the speech, the meeting, the announcement -and avoiding more intricate social and economic stories that really affect the city.

When Seattle Mayor J. D. Braman, concerned by his city's transportation problems, invited the local newspapers to send reporters along with him to study Toronto's rapid transit system, both papers turned him down. One told him to phone for an interview from Toronto. "Imagine!" griped the mayor. "A telephone interview to explain something as complicated as rapid transit. Yet when they captured that whale up in Canada, they could afford to have a reporter and a photographer stay away on that story for weeks."

First-Person Specialists. The problem facing all papers is how to master the journalistic problem of making complex city affairs as interesting to readers as tales of stranded whales. Larry Fanning, executive editor of the Chicago Daily News, who admits that no Chicago daily, including his own, successfully communicates city government to the reader, is about to appoint an "urban specialist," who will roam the city to "examine the quality of life in Chicago." Fanning is also instructing reporters to write more stories in the first person so that readers can feel personally involved. "I don't think we have a reportorial gap in covering city government," says Fanning. "I just don't think we've found out how to write about it. The problem is one of inadequate translation of major problems into terms that get through to people."

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