The nation's eyes are upon Pennsylvania, and so old cliches rain down as America's political journalists hit the ground hackneyed.

Patrick Sheridan, a 22-year-old Pittsburgher studying law in Washington, D.C., e-mailed last week to urge us "to get out in front of Pittsburgh's being labeled a Rust Belt city during the next six weeks of intense primary coverage.''

I don't mind "Rust Belt.'' There's a reason for the label. But too many reporters working on deadline will lazily grab at old standbys such as "gritty'' and "rusting'' and "abandoned'' and leave readers thinking that's all there is.

My pet peeve is "hardscrabble,'' a common journalistic crutch that you'll never hear spoken in the wild. The first dictionary definition is "being or related to a place of barren or barely arable soil,'' but the press mostly uses its second sense, "marked by poverty.'' What it really means in journalese is "I'm glad I don't live here.''

Not necessarily immune to journalistic conventions myself, I did an Internet search for "Pennsylvania primary'' and "hardscrabble." I stopped my quest when I got to "The Tube City Almanac" (tubecityonline.com), a Web site dedicated to all things McKeesport, because its author was way ahead of me.

What follows is Jason Togyer's pitch-perfect lampoon of the way national journalists write about Western Pennsylvania:

McKEESPORT, Pa. -- Boarded-up storefronts line the main street of this once-bustling mill town in the Monongahela River Valley.

Proud, defiant steelworkers once carried lunch pails to the hulking steel mills that lined both sides of the river, belching smoke ??? Elderly local resident [insert name here] points with pride to the mill, whose smoke once blackened the skies.

"We were proud and defiant," says the lifelong resident of McKeesport, Pa., a once-bustling steel mill town south of Pittsburgh, who worked for 30 years in the local mill, making steel.

The skies have surprisingly cleared, and the mills are now silent, and in the shadows of their rusty hulks, the proud, defiant children and grandchildren of steelworkers ...

And so on. Mr. Togyer, a proud (and defiant) graduate of McKeesport's Serra Catholic High School and Carnegie Mellon University, even managed to work "hardscrabble'' into his satire three times. (He credits an e-mail correspondent, Bob Braughler, for feeding him the word "that's sweeping America. The nation is going hardscrabble.'')

We met for coffee in Oakland, where Mr. Togyer, 33, works for the University of Pittsburgh's Office of Public Affairs.

"There's a dreary sameness to these stories,'' he said. "They don't tell the reader anything. I could, as I did the other night, write one in five minutes.''

Don't misunderstand. In no way does he care to deny our steel heritage, but he sees a two-tiered problem with a regular "wallow in pity and nostalgia.''

First, we still make steel here.

Second, the focus on what's gone has people missing a post-industrial story of education, medicine and high technology.

The U.S. Steel Corp. plans to invest $1 billion in its Clairton coke-making plant over the next several years to help clear the air. Its Edgar Thomson Plant in Braddock still makes high value-added steel, operated at 95 percent capacity last year, more than 130 years on.

Together with the Irvin Plant in West Mifflin, the research and technology center in Munhall, the Transtar railroad arm and the Downtown headquarters, U.S. Steel employs 4,900 people in Western Pennsylvania. That's a fraction of steel's glory days, but these highly skilled jobs aren't filled with ghosts.

As for the new economy, Pittsburgh is one of America's five fastest-growing regions for investments by venture capital firms, according to MoneyTree. Forty-four new companies received money last year, up from just 12 in 1997. Pitt and UPMC do pretty well, too, and Carnegie Mellon's Robotics Institute neither hulks nor rusts.

Some national media do work a fuller Pittsburgh into their copy and Mr. Togyer is sympathetic to the pressure of banging out a deadline story in a strange town. He doesn't want to overstate the case.

"Not everybody is working in the robot factory, building gene splicers.''

But if you're among the tens of thousands who work in hospitals, universities or office towers, you might want to smudge your face with soot until the primary's over.