In the fourth-floor press room at the State House, there’s no more popular sport than flack-bashing. If reporters harbor a natural mistrust of politicians, it’s nothing compared to their contempt for the press functionaries who run political interference for pols. “Goddamn flack” is a ritual refrain that reverberates around the room, usually following the slam of a phone like an echo. It’s a reflex reaction to the slow call-backs, information-hoarding and obliviousness about deadlines that sabotage a reporter’s stories more effectively than any artful message-spinning ever could.

But the enmity may be breaking down. That’s because a growing number of veteran reporters are going over the wall and into the pay of politicians and state agencies they once covered. More than a dozen print and broadcast reporters on the State House beat have turned press secretary or “communications director” for government officials and agencies since 1990, most within the last five years (see chart).

To be sure, there has been a slow trickle of newspeople into political campaigns and government offices since the earliest days of the printing press. “It isn’t anything new. People have been doing it for years,” says WBZ-TV’s John Henning. “It doesn’t indicate a trend, unless you go back to the first reporter who went to work for a politician.”

But without question the trend line is up, and not going unnoticed. One State House bureau chief gets a regular ribbing from a newsroom editor, who greets him with, “What, no fat government job yet?” And the comings and (mostly) goings of State House reporters have become juicy scuttlebutt in political circles. “They are the gossip in our kaffeeklatsches,” says Rep. Marie Parente, D-Milford.

Despite the much-vaunted downsizing of state government, the demand for official spokespersons has never been higher. At one time only the state’s top elected officials had press secretaries, but in the 1980s these jobs proliferated until nearly every agency, big or small, had a flack of its own. And when, in 1990, much of state government fell into Republican hands for the first time in a generation, the GOP lacked the deep pool of party coatholders and flacks-in-waiting that the dominant Democrats had long nurtured. The press corps became the logical place to troll for public-relations talent.

In the years since, politicians of all stripes have come to see the virtue in having a newsroom veteran handle the care and feeding of the press. “It’s become almost a fad among the powerful to get a reporter for their press guy,” says one reporter-turned-spokesman.

But what’s really changed is the appetite of newshounds for jobs as political frontmen. For some, it’s a different way to indulge the passion for politics they developed as reporters.

“I had watched [politics] long enough that, foolishly, I thought I could actually do it,” says Bob Bliss, until recently Governor Bill Weld’s press secretary, who gave up his job as political reporter and columnist for Worcester’s Telegram & Gazette in 1992 to become press secretary for an unsuccessful Congressional campaign. Similarly, Ray Howell left the Lowell Sun to join Weld’s 1990 campaign for governor in part, he says, because “I always thought it would be fun to see a political campaign from the inside.”

But for most, it’s because the news business had become a dead-end job. A few traumatic episodes resulted in direct casualties: State government is littered with refugees from WEEI-AM, which switched from all-news to all-sports in 1991. But it’s the drying up of routine opportunities for professional–and financial–advancement that’s driving out some of the best reporters.

Newspapers have been contracting, rather than expanding, since the late 1980s, and salaries have stayed flat. And the journalistic feeder system–from hometown weekly to regional daily to, last stop, The Boston Globe–has nearly dried up. The result, for many reporters, is a mid-career crisis that comes alarmingly early in life.

“Part of it is, we grow up,” says Jeremy Crockford, 38, Massport spokesman and former Patriot Ledger State House bureau chief. “I was in a room of eight reporters who, within two years, all had their first children. We all bought houses in that same period. And newspapers don’t pay particularly well.”

Being a reporter “was a great job when I was in my 20s, when all I needed was rent money and beer money,” says Eric Fehrnstrom, 35. As State House bureau chief for the Boston Herald, Fehrnstrom found he’d “really topped out” as a reporter. He made the decision to join Treasurer Joe Malone’s office four months after the birth of his first child. “Then I was overworked and underpaid. Now I’m just overworked,” he says.

“I was no longer the crazy guy who could go out and blow part of my paycheck at Foley’s,” echoes Ed Cafasso, 35, former Boston Herald State House reporter who became spokesman for Attorney General Scott Harshbarger. “Realistically, if you’re a print reporter in this town, the only option [for a long-term career in journalism] is The Boston Globe. If they’re not hiring you, or not hiring you fast enough, you have to think about other options.”

And those options are being exercised. After just three years in the State House, John Hoey of the Brockton Enterprise finds himself one of the more senior people in the press gallery.

“Reporters aren’t sticking around,” he says. But Hoey, president of the State House Press Association, maintains that the exodus isn’t just to the world of politics. “They’re leaving newspaper reporting, period.”

He’s seen colleagues leave for trade publications, online services, public relations–any place that offers more pay and more opportunity.”It’s tough to look ahead, being in the newspaper world.”

From their former compatriots, the journalistic turncoats get a certain amount of slander about “going over to the dark side.” But for the most part, the reporters they leave behind are coming to view such career moves as almost natural.

“I don’t have a problem with it,” says Jon Keller, a political analyst for WLVI-TV who contributes a column for The Boston Globe. “These are mature people who have kids and mortgages and get tired of trying to make a go of it on newspaper salaries. Look at me. I bust my ass at three jobs trying to make a good living.”

But some critics of State House press coverage wonder if these moves aren’t becoming altogether too natural.

“Sometimes you wonder why, when you give out certain information, you never see it in the paper,” says Rep. Parente. “Then you see a reporter become press secretary for the very agency you were trying to reform. It’s a scary thing.”

John Gatti, Jr., legislative chairman of the Massachusetts Organization of State Engineers and Scientists (MOSES), thinks that increasing pressures and diminishing rewards have weakened the State House press corps–and made it easier for state officials to cozy up to reporters.

“Currently, a lobbyist cannot buy a cup of coffee for a legislator. But the press can get wined and schmoozed,” complains Gatti, who keeps a running tally of reporters who join up with pols. He thinks that the press association should maintain a “code of ethics” that precludes reporters from taking a political job within a year of leaving the State House press corps, much as state employees are barred from lobbying for one year after they leave state service.

Hoey concedes that the danger of State House reporters coming to view the politicians they cover as prospective employers is “a natural concern. But in practice, I haven’t seen it happen.” For instance, Hoey says, if Eric Fehrnstrom had gone soft on his future boss you couldn’t see it when he was still at the newspaper. “For his going-away party, we put together all these nasty clips he wrote about Joe Malone,” Hoey says.

What is clear is that, as journalism becomes a career not fit for grown-ups, the news industry suffers a brain drain, and nowhere is the hemorrhaging worse than at the State House.

“Every time somebody goes over, so to speak, we’re losing the best and the brightest,” says Jack Authelet, an officer of the Society of Professional Journalists Massachusetts chapter. “We’re losing from the wrong end.”

“The newspaper industry runs on young, inexperienced people. You find very few middle-aged reporters,” adds Lou DiNatale, a senior fellow at the McCormack Institute at UMass Boston. “What we have here is a case of the media eating their young.”

Robert Keough is a free-lance writer in Brookline.