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A year at States, says veteran sleuth Seymour Hersh - who often sends aspiring young reporters there - "is comparable to 37 years of journalism school." More than 400 reporters have earned their stripes in this fashion before moving on to more prestigious postings. States is the boot camp, the basic-training hitch that turns raw recruits into writing men and women. Think of Washington journalism as a kind of military establishment peopled by high-powered generals, captains and lieutenants, each commanding a unit of battle-scarred hacks. Each day States slices and dices Beltway news into chunks too small for Beltway bigfeet to bother with but juicy enough for editors in Boise, Butte and Boston. It is a business based on the old adage that all politics is local. Richmond's mini-scoop was tailor-made for his employer, States News Service, a Washington bureau that covers the capital for 150 newspapers in 35 states. Not much of a story, you might say - and you'd be both right and wrong. He now recalls the moment with an air of nonchalance ("It's amazing how fast you get jaded in this town") but does admit that "sitting two yards away from the vice president is a pretty cool thing." Richmond ran to a phone and dictated his notes for the afternoon edition. "But you can guess where my sympathies are." "I think that it has to be presented in a way that allows the secretary of transportation to make the proper evaluations," Gore said carefully. Now he had the chance to ask the vice president of the United States whether he would support the effort of his adopted home town. He had been churning out stories about Nashville's hotly contested bid for a plane route to London. The 28-year-old reporter was attending the briefing on behalf of the Nashville Banner. But Kelly Richmond, one of the assembled scribes, had a more parochial matter on his mind. Gore spoke of Bosnia and Boris Yeltsin, of family leave and health care reform. It was the 99th day of the Clinton presidency, and half a dozen reporters were ushered into the Old Executive Office Building to hear Al Gore talk up the new administration's record.