Required Reading

Why is the Bureau of National Affairs Washington's biggest media organization? Because for more than 70 years, it's covered the government's every move.

Michael W. Lynch from the June 1999 issue

Ask most Americans which news organization is the most ubiquitous and influential in Washington, and they'll probably name The Washington Post or perhaps split the ticket with CNN. They'd be surprised to know that the news organization with the most reporters covering the daily machinations of the federal government is not the mighty Post, the hometown's dominant daily. Nor is it The New York Times, America's paper of record, which claims to gather all the news that's fit to print.

Washington's most omnipresent media organization is something called the Bureau of National Affairs. Unless you buy one of its products--which means you're most likely a lobbyist, health care executive, bureaucrat, human resource officer, labor lawyer, government affairs manager for a major corporation, or environmental compliance officer--you've probably never heard of BNA. But each day, this unsung company sends about 220 reporters into the halls of Congress and executive agencies, compared with about 60 each for the Post and Times. These BNA journalists, part of a worldwide staff of 1,657, fill some 200 high-priced publications with thousands of pages of "just the facts" copy, all chronicling, in great detail, what federal, state, and international bureaucracies are up to.

"No sir, we are not a part of the federal government," is the standard BNA response to the inevitable question. The company is, rather, a facts funnel for government information on policies that affect business. Its writers know, as rookie reporter John Stewart was told 60 years ago, that "nobody is going to read what you write because he wants to. He's reading it because he has to. All he wants is facts." (The advice worked well for Stewart, who served as president and CEO from 1964-79 before moving up to chairman of the board until he retired in 1993.)

With a few exceptions--education policy, welfare issues that don't relate to labor or taxes, and foreign policy that isn't trade-related--if policy is being made, BNA is telling its subscribers about it. "They are a journal of record for the regulatory apparatus," says C. Boyden Gray, who served as counsel to regulatory task forces in the Reagan and Bush administrations. (Gray is a trustee of the Reason Foundation, REASON's parent organization.) He reads BNA's Daily Environment Report every day ($2,998 a year for print, around $2,000 for Web or e-mail delivery). "The business pages used to cover this more 20 years ago," says Gray. "Then it got to be too much, so they basically don't cover it at all any more."

As Gray suggests, the regulatory state's growth has been good for BNA. In the company's history and publications, we can see not only the patterns of that expansion but a disturbing fact about ubiquitous regulation: Simply keeping up with what the law requires has become so burdensome that tracking government actions can employ hundreds of reporters updating thousands of regulatory specialists. BNA's success, while an impressive business story, suggests the costs of regulation, most of which are never measured. The company's sales, only the tip of this iceberg, were $269 million last year.

The BNA story also suggests a rarely acknowledged interest group calculus: All those reporters and readers have become, sometimes despite their best intentions, implicit supporters of the regulatory state. "Well," chuckles Michael Maibach, Intel's Washington-based vice president for government affairs, "I think everyone thinks government could do a little bit less, but it's part of our job to keep track of what the government is doing, and you know, we're as happy as we can be. We happen to like these jobs." All that brainpower--of BNA's writers and editors, and of its subscribers--is also a regulatory cost, diverted from more productive pursuits.

Growing Gains

BNA began in 1929 with The United States Daily, which founder David Lawrence envisioned as a national paper of record, publishing the texts of laws, regulations, and court decisions. The idea failed. Subscriptions peaked at only 100,000, too few to support a conventional publication. A few years later on a train trip to New York, however, New York Times publisher Adolph Ochs offered Lawrence some valuable advice: There just aren't enough people who need daily information with that level of detail to support an advertising base, Ochs told Lawrence, who by then knew his publication was doomed. But, continued Ochs, the people who do need that information need it badly, and will be willing to pay enough to support advertisement-free publications.

That became the BNA model: expensive, ad-free publications focusing long and deep on public policy issues that affect business. (Lawrence converted The United States Daily into a weekly that later became U.S. News and World Report.) The newly reconstituted BNA's first two publications were a quarterly, U.S. Patents, Trademark & Copyright Reports, which published the text of patents and court decisions, and U.S. Law Week, which focused on federal and state court decisions. The company's raw material has remained largely government-supplied ever since.

"We grew with the government," says Mike Cavanagh, executive editor of BNA's Business Information Division. "We have expanded whenever a new body of regulation has been developed."

Not surprisingly, the New Deal was good for BNA's business. In 1937, the company got a major boost when President Roosevelt called for a national investigation of the practices of American business. "Among us today a concentration of private power without equal in history is growing," Roosevelt declared. "This concentration is seriously impairing the economic effectiveness of private enterprise."

To investigate, Congress established the Temporary National Economic Committee, composed of six members of Congress and six representatives of the executive branch. Lawrence knew that Roosevelt was putting American business on trial--which meant that business executives would need immediate, detailed information on the committee hearings. He offered the committee a deal: BNA would provide printed and bound daily transcripts to the committee for free. It would sell the same transcripts to other interested parties, delivered overnight, for $25 a week. BNA soon had 2,000 subscribers. The six-month investigation is documented in 13 volumes that sit today in the company's archives.

Such cooperation has served both the federal government and BNA well. In 1941, BNA became the govern-ment's visible hand, publishing its Daily Report on Price and Production Controls, Manpower Report, and War Labor Report. BNA was the only private publisher to receive an unlimited allocation of paper during the war, and it became the largest private user of air service.

After World War II, Lawrence sold the company to its most senior editors, who cut all of BNA's employees in on the deal, creating a wholly employee-owned corporation in 1947. Back then, BNA had 279 full-time employees, the Federal Register had 8,902 pages, and the Code of Federal Regulations had 22,285 pages. Since then, each has increased more than five-fold.

One Word: Ergonomics