By Elizabeth Valk Long

Fans of the PBS children's show The Electric Company will recall a spoof of old radio detective programs; it was called Fargo North, Decoder. This indelible cultural reference aside, North Dakota's largest city has not received much media attention. So when Time correspondents Wendy Cole and Michael Duffy went to Fargo to report this week's story on the expected impact of federal budget cuts, the locals were flattered. "Countless times during my 10 days there," Cole says, "people asked what other towns we were visiting. When I told them none, they had trouble believing that their laid-back community warranted such intense scrutiny by TIME."

Cole has the intensity and the passion for the job. A graduate of Cornell and the Columbia School of Journalism, she became a Chicago-based correspondent this year after stints as a reporter in TIME's People, Nation and Society sections. Approaching her assignments as a terrier does a trouser cuff, she hustled an exclusive interview with University of Michigan cyberpornographer Jake Baker days before his arrest by the FBI. She also uncovered a potentially dangerous internal revolt by a breakaway militant faction of the Ku Klux Klan.

"Wendy has an insatiable curiosity," says chief of correspondents Joelle Attinger, "that routinely takes her beyond groupthink or the easy take on just about any story." Says assistant managing editor Stephen Koepp, who edited the Fargo story: "She has a rare affinity for both people and numbers, which can bring a policy story vibrantly to life."

It was Cole who chose Fargo as the microcosm for the debate on federal benevolence and intrusion. Says Duffy, who wrote the story: "She saw it as a fascinating mix of frontier and front page. Then she dissected the town until she knew more about it than a lot of Fargoans. Late last week, needing an anecdote, she ran down to a local bowling alley, did three interviews and delivered a freshly minted kicker for the story inside of an hour."

Cole found that Fargoans do their homework. "Before meeting me," she says, "one businessman insisted on doing a computer data-base search of all the articles I ever wrote." But to Cole, once a "jaded, guarded New Yorker," Midwestern charm has proved contagious; she felt at ease with her subjects. In turn, they readily offered clues of the coming budget cuts to TIME's Fargo north decoder.