Newsrooms rethink centralized model
By Jean Friedman-Rudovsky, Columbia Journalism Review, February 6, 2017
Freelance journalist Abigail Edge was at an Online News Association conference in Los Angeles in 2015 and found herself chatting with the head of a prominent national trade publishing association. The woman asked where she lived. “When I told her Denver she laughed and said ‘that’s not really America. Only the east and west coasts are America,’” Edge recalls. The reporter found the comment irritating, but says that “it seemed that that attitude was not uncommon.” She often had difficulty getting national media executives and editors to care about stories outside of the coasts and was getting the impression journalism higher-ups considered her choice of home base as a career impediment. Not wanting to ruffle feathers, Edge smiled and walked away.
She wonders whether the woman has changed her attitude. The media’s collective misfire on the 2016 election has led to an acknowledgement of our own “media bubbles”--insular elite worlds in a handful of coastal cities where journalists congregate and lose touch with … everyone else. The bubbles exist, in part, because legacy publications and new digital outlets still rely on a centralized newsroom model that requires editorial staff comes into an office--typically located in the most expensive cities in the nation.
The digital age, rather than fostering a new era of remote work, actually increased our profession’s geographic concentration. One out of every five media jobs was located in New York City, Washington, DC, or Los Angeles in 2014, up from one in eight 10 years prior, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data crunched by The Washington Post.
“You can’t just send a gifted reporter to a far-away place and get anything much more than an archaic portrait of rural or red small-town America,” says editor Kristin Roberts, who blamed the media bubble problem for her departure from Politico. “We need to, as journalists, know these communities, be there to experience them, and write accurately about them and for them,” she says.
Anne Trubek, a Cleveland-based writer, says that parachuters have trouble grasping nuance, intricacies--and sometimes glaring facts. During the lead-up to the election, she says, “there was one article after another about the white working class steelworker in the Rust Belt.” The problem is, health care is the No. 1 employer in Cleveland. Factories are 8th and 9th. “Your average voter here is an African American woman making $11 per hour in health care,” says Trubek, the founder of Belt Publishing, which runs Belt Magazine and a small press focusing on the Rust Belt and Midwest. “People who live here would never think that typical Trump voter was a factory worker,” she says.
Beyond coverage that misses the mark, parachuting is predicated on an belief that the rest of the country only deserves spot coverage: Ohio during a Presidential election; New Orleans after a terrible hurricane; the Mexican border whenever there’s an uptick in immigration discussion in the Beltway. The reality, says Sarah Kendzior, a freelancer based in St. Louis, may be the opposite. “We in the Midwest are often ahead of the curve in terms of crises--economic, political polarization, racial strife,” she says. Her city witnessed an early rise of the Tea Party and the birth of the Black Lives Matter movement. “The idea that [the middle of the country] is some sort of boring wasteland is really fraudulent,” she said.
“It seems crazy to me that there are a lot of good journalists who don’t live in major cities of America, and they are not able to find work,” says Denver-based Edge, who’s a native of the UK. She has been offered four jobs at national publications since coming to Denver, but she refuses to relocate to DC or New York on a salary that would force her to live with a roommate.
Along with other media customs, such as unpaid internships and higher degree requirements, newsrooms based in the most expensive cities in the US effectively limit the ability of people who aren’t coastal urban, elite-university educated white liberals. Latria Graham, a long-form writer of color who’s from and lives in South Carolina, has no desire to live in New York because she loves the South and considers her location an advantage for unique reporting. “People are like: ‘Oh, Trump’s America what does that look like?’ I’ve been in it for 30 years,” Graham says.
Those who ignore this issue could eventually regret a lack of self-reflection. Because geographic diversity is connected to something crucial to what we do: audience trust in our work. “The most hurtful thing [about the 2016 election] was how little American people care about the facts that journalists were giving them,” says Kristin Roberts, who is now executive editor of McClatchy’s Washington Bureau. She adds, “We have to own that. We have a role in this and we have to have to figure out what we did to contribute to a broken relationship.”
“Often people outside of these major city bubbles see themselves depicted in print and on television in a sensationalized way, without any nuance,” she says. “The thought is ‘well, if they’re getting depictions of us wrong, what else are they getting wrong?’ People start distrusting or simply stop paying attention to the information presented to them.”
