Political Notebook: The empty seat inside the State House press gallery

January 24, 2025

By Gintautas Dumcius

From New York to Bangkok, the Associated Press frequently breaks news as its reporters throw themselves into stories.

But the story of the not-for-profit wire service’s future plans for Massachusetts State House coverage – and the question of whether they expect to fill a now-empty seat in the press gallery – is apparently still being written after the departure of a longtime AP veteran. Steve LeBlanc, who covered the political rise of governors and the nitty-gritty of state budgets totaling tens of billions of dollars, quietly took a buyout from the news agency earlier this month, one of many to do so.

The AP, which turns 179 this year, has seen its share of budget pressures, layoffs, and unrelenting change brought about by technological upheaval. The agency still has “several” journalists in Massachusetts, a spokesman said Thursday, but did not provide a specific headcount.

The AP’s own media reporter noted, when the agency announced it was looking to cut eight percent of its staff in the weeks after the November election, that AP no longer claims to be the world’s largest news gathering organization and “doesn’t reveal the size of its staff.” Months before the election, AP was rocked when two newspaper chains, which like other major news outlets were paying for the services AP provides, said they were dropping the agency.

“One of the things that was always a source of pride and a real source of power and authority was its 50-state footprint,” said Glen Johnson, a former AP State House bureau chief before leaving for the Boston Globe and then the US State Department. “A big driver of that was its presence in all 50 state houses. The reality is, though, with the contraction of revenue industry-wide, the AP, like most other news organizations, has been forced to cut back its staff and reshape its priorities. In this day and age there’s a huge emphasis on digital and video coverage, and that is now the top priority for the AP in each state.”

That’s meant a shift away from coverage of state politics over the last several years, but Patrick Maks, the AP’s spokesman, said in an email they do still have a reporter covering the Legislature on Beacon Hill. They also plan to add another reporter to their team based in Boston. He did not respond to a follow-up question about whether that meant someone would be taking over LeBlanc’s desk in the press gallery on the fourth floor.

“There’s no substitute for being physically present where news happens and in a state house, there’s few things more powerful than being able to confront a newsmaker in person and at times other than official events. That only comes from proximity to power,” said Johnson, the former AP bureau chief who tag-teamed state politics coverage with LeBlanc under the golden dome.

“Some of the biggest stories I got as a state house reporter came because I bumped into somebody unexpectedly or saw something that I otherwise wouldn’t have seen,” he added.

While empty seats are a common sight inside the press room nowadays, not all news outlets have disappeared. Reporters from the Boston Herald, GBH News, the Worcester Telegram, WWLP-TV of Western Massachusetts, Axios Boston, Politico Massachusetts, and Springfield-based MassLive all regularly take a seat. The State House News Service, an independently owned wire service that’s been around since the 1890s, has about a half dozen reporters next door, and WBUR has one. The Boston Globe has an office down the hall, located directly above the governor.

The Associated Press has had reporters on Beacon Hill for at least as long as State House News, according to State House Press Association records. “There have always been Massachusetts political leaders on the rise and the AP’s State House bureau chronicled that pretty closely,” Johnson said, listing off names like Tip O’Neill, the US House speaker who sparred with President Ronald Reagan; US Sen. John Kerry; and governors like Mike Dukakis, Mitt Romney, and Deval Patrick.

LeBlanc, Johnson’s former colleague who took the buyout, was there for the Romney and Patrick years, and the governors who followed. He declined to comment when reached via phone on Thursday. 

For people who know LeBlanc, it wasn’t surprising. He doesn’t like fanfare, preferring instead to cover the issues affecting people, as Johnson put it, from Pittsfield to Provincetown. “People in Massachusetts may not realize it, but Steve LeBlanc was a true public servant,” he said.

When the candy man meets the tax man

Gov. Maura Healey wants to salt sweets with a new tax.

The budget proposal her administration rolled out this week subjects candy to the state’s 6.25 percent sales tax, among other proposals. Just 11 states, including Massachusetts, exempt candy, according to WBZ.

Healey’s press release on the budget plan avoided mentioning the measure, as did the budget proposal’s executive summary. Governors are typically loathe to talk taxes, unless they’re talking about cuts. But tax hikes also don’t necessarily hurt reelection prospects, as Gov. Deval Patrick showed in 2010, a year after he increased the state’s sales tax to the current rate, up from 5 percent.

Healey was adamant with reporters on Wednesday that removing candy’s exemption is not a new tax. "What this is doing is simply saying when you go to the grocery store, instead of having candy treated like a purchase of bread and eggs and milk – essential groceries – that candy is now going to treated in the same way as when you go to the bakery in the back of the grocery store and pick up cupcakes for your kids,” she said.

News outlets didn’t buy it. From the Boston Globe to WBUR, the headlines noted the proposed new tax. (They also went with the larger bottom line for the budget, $62 billion, rather than the Healey administration’s preferred $59.6 billion, which does not include spending of millionaires tax revenue.)

Doug Howgate, the head of the business-backed Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation who closely analyzes budget proposals, said applying the sales tax to candy is a tax change.

Asked directly whether it’s a tax increase, Howgate’s answer was simple: If you buy candy, it is.

Whether the Legislature bites will be seen in the coming months as they put forward their own budget proposals, before hammering out a final version for Healey’s approval in the summer.