The Insider's Insider: N.H.'s Guy for News
By Hanna Rosin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, January 25, 2004; Page D01
DERRY, N.H. -- Answering a question at one of his town hall meetings, Howard Dean ad-libbed a divinely sarcastic way to call Wesley Clark a Republican -- "I don't mind that he voted for Nixon and Reagan -- that was a long time ago" -- perfect copy for the media throng. "Bless you," shouted a wire service reporter, all fingers typing. The quote would appear on the wire after the event had ended, give or take editing glitches, maybe an hour later.
That is about 58 minutes late by the standards of James Pindell, editor of PoliticsNH.com, the newest arrival on the New Hampshire primary media scene. As usual, Pindell could be found in the back, last row on the right, recognizable by his trademark Elvis Costello glasses and reddish hair. On a laptop with a 12-inch screen, Pindell typed up Dean's quote and posted it on his Web site, "before Dean was on the next question," he says.
In the small-town drama that is the New Hampshire primary, one key role has always been the Important Local Journalist. For a long time it was the blistering William Loeb, publisher of the Manchester Union Leader. He was followed by Carl Cameron of WMUR, the only statewide TV station, who recently left to join Fox News. Their equivalent in Iowa is David Yepsen, a reporter and now columnist with the Des Moines Register.
They were men who had cultivated their positions for decades, who were as much a part of the political establishment as the governor. Candidates coming to town every four years knew to court them with a private dinner or endlessly flattering phone calls, depending on the size of their ego.
"Oh, no, I'm no Carl Cameron," says Pindell, who is properly deferential. "Not yet."
Or maybe that role is becoming obsolete. Because as Pindell proved, a 25-year-old with a laptop and some backers can in two years do what it took others decades to accomplish: become the central clearinghouse of information about the presidential primary, from schedules to hourly updates on who's trashing whom.
The political analysis on his Web site may not be as sophisticated as Yepsen's and no candidates are buying him dinner, but Pindell is a whiff of the inevitable. "PoliticsNH is part of our changing world," says Tom Rath, a Republican activist who logs onto the Web site at least twice a day. "It's not so establishment. It's got an openness to it. I guess this means our little universe has to evolve."
In many ways the New Hampshire primary exists in a time warp. Every four years, candidates come and campaign in the same diners serving the same menus, open the same offices on the same sagging downtown street, court the same state representatives and union bosses who seem to have been around forever, all in the service of old-fashioned retail politics.
But change is eating away at the edges. Commuters from Boston and the Northeast have flooded the state in the last five years, and many are indifferent to its arcane political traditions. New young campaign workers come here to work and stay during the off years, forming their own political establishment. The Dean campaign takes the New Hampshire traditions and upends them, using the Internet to reach out to voters, one by one.
Embedded reporters follow candidates everywhere, making it nearly impossible to have an exclusive, much less a private dinner. And now there is James Pindell, who estimates he can broadcast the latest mud-throwing so quickly on his Web site that soon candidates will come to rely on him to find out what their opponents are saying about them, instead of using those campaign spies they send to one another's events.
The description of Pindell's role as techno-vanguard would not sit well with him. Not too far out of graduate school in journalism, Pindell sees himself in the old-school model: a political junkie, a newsman chasing the scoop, thinking "every news cycle, how can I own it."
"We're just like the boys on the bus," he says of his news staff of two, plus three interns. "Only we're the boys on the bus with laptops."
Pindell grew up in Indiana, where in eighth grade he began writing congressmen he saw on C-SPAN. When Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.) left him a response on his voice mail, an addiction was born. He graduated from Drake University in Des Moines early so he wouldn't miss the last Iowa caucuses. He spent that year working for Yepsen, for whom he toiled away, a happy factotum, soaking up the master's lessons.
Two years ago, while covering the statehouse in West Virginia for a small newspaper, he got a strange offer. It came by e-mail from PoliticsNJ.com and invited Pindell to work at a similar site in New Hampshire. The sender was anonymous. Pindell has still never met his backers or talked to them by phone. He communicates with them by e-mail and deals with an accountant, who is regular with the checks. He guesses they are not journalists, but still Pindell felt a kinship: "They were junkies worse than I am."
"I thought, 'Okay, this is a huge risk. What if I go there and the whole thing collapses?' " After all, here he was about to move hundreds of miles away to a place where he knew no one, for a group of anonymous backers. "But then the junkie part of me said, 'Oh, my God, I totally have to do this.' " Plus, PoliticsNJ had built a solid reputation, and the New Hampshire site had its share of groupies. So he jumped, under the condition that he be allowed to use bylines at the New Hampshire site, a change from the previous anonymous dispatches. For a month, he worked out of his car, showing up at picnics and dinners and any open political event and introducing himself.
That was the summer of 2002. Back then, people treated him like a weirdo from community-access television. Now, the candidates all know his name. Now, when his heroes at various newspapers come to town to cover the primary, they take him to dinner. Now, when the Clark campaign wants to open an office, staffers call him for advice.
He felt the wonder of it one day last fall when he was standing in "some New England house with the snow falling, the fireplace going, kids running around upstairs, and there's Howard Dean speaking to me and 17 other people, and tears came to my eyes. I thought, 'This is the freaking New Hampshire primary. How lucky am I to experience this?' "
The Web site has had its share of scoops. It was the first to post that Clark was running. Its most memorable moment may have been running a dating contest for the single Kucinich. Since the site started it has gone from 500 unique viewers a month to 12,000 a day.
"The thing that sets us apart is, we are the insider's insider," he says. "No detail is too small. If the Dean campaign opens a new office in Derry, we print that. If Gephardt hires a new staffer, we print it. We don't do the candidate profile but the campaign manager's profile. Our readers love that stuff."
As if to prove his mastery of the arcane, he picks up a call from one of his interns who wants some direction:
"We haven't covered Kucinich in 21/2 weeks," he says, and then dictates from memory Kucinich's upcoming schedule down to 15-minute intervals. Some New Hampshire insiders grumble that the site was better in its earliest days, when postings were anonymous, when it was much looser with its gossip. "Before, we were addicted to it," says a local Democrat. "I would log on several times a day and think, 'How did they get that stuff?' even if you weren't entirely sure it was true. Now someone over there has made the decision to go from anonymous gossip to legitimate news source. And we miss it."
But Pindell, who dreams beyond local gossip, says, "When you're anonymous you have no credibility."
On Saturday night he meets with his staff at a local bar, the Wild Rover, to plan the final week before the primary. With their turkey sandwich and potato chip platters they look like a study group cramming for final exams. Pindell gives them assignments but warns that this week they have to be ready to update every 10 minutes if necessary.
"When are we sleeping this week?" asks writer Sam Youngman. "We're not sleeping," says Pindell, not really joking.
When he gets through the assignments for Jan. 27, the day of the vote, the staffers relax and pick up their sandwiches, but Pindell is not done. Who knows where he'll be in four years; he'd like to be writing his own column somewhere. But all he knows now is that the following day the site is still in business. On Jan. 28, he says, to staff disbelief, "we game the prospects for 2008."
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