For many upwardly mobile young journalists, a successful career is one that leads from the city-hall pressroom to the statehouse beat to a national reporting job in Washington. Neal Peirce got it all backward. He started at the top, as Washington-based political editor of a respected national magazine. Today he covers city hall and the statehouse.
That progression is no fall from grace. At a time when state and local governments are spending almost as much money and employing as many citizens as Uncle Sam does domestically, Peirce, 45, has emerged as the only national chronicler of grassroots America. In his weekly column, which appears in as many as 140 papers (among them: the Los Angeles Times, Baltimore Sun and Boston Globe), he discusses such topics as local energy-conservation schemes, the unionization of public employees, a freeway-turned-park in Seattle and redlining in city neighborhoods. His stories can have wide impact. A column on Colorado's "sunset law," which requires a yearly re-evaluation of spending programs, prompted legislators in eight other states to introduce similar measures. Peirce also dispenses local anesthetic for painful civic problems through regular articles in the fact-packed National Journal (circ. 3,200), an authoritative Government-watching weekly he helped launch in 1969, which is one of the nation's most expensive publications (yearly subscription: $300).
Peirce has only gradually discovered his vocation. After getting his B.A. from Princeton and studying international relations at Harvard, he became a Congressman's aide, then political editor of Washington's Congressional Quarterly. There he was struck by the dearth of information on state and local problems. He decided that John Gunther's Inside U.S.A. (1947) should be updated, asked Gunther if he might help him do the job and instead received the author's blessing to take on the project alone. The result: seven books on regions of the U.S., beginning with The Megastates in 1972. An eighth volume, The Mid-Atlantic States, will be published next month.
Peirce's extensive traveling and his research convinced him that "there was lots happening out in the country that official Washington and chic New York were not aware of." In March 1975 he started writing a biweekly column on local affairs of national significance, simply mailing it from his home to papers across the country. He now writes weekly, has 65 regular subscribers and many other occasional users. He asks the latter group to pay their regular rate for a feature of similar length, which may vary from $15 to $75. Although Peirce spends two weeks of every month on the road, he still handles the details of mailing and bookkeeping himself, avoiding the standard 50% syndication fee. This regimen nets him "a nice middle income," he says, "but not posh." It also nets him the respect of other journalists. "He fills a tremendous gap," says Washington Post Editorial Page Editor Philip Geyelin. "He tells us what problems look like from the other end of the telescope." Adds Phyllis Lamphere, president of the National League of Cities: "He is the link between the preoccupied Washington press and the local reporting done in states."