Journalists losing touch with the man on the street

In an era when network anchors in tailor-made suits sign multimillion-dollar contracts, and some of their talking-head, syndicated columnist colleagues earn more from one speech than the average American earns in an entire year, it may be difficult to imagine, but journalism in this country was, until relatively recently, a largely blue-collar craft.

As recently as 1971, only 58% of newspaper journalists had college degrees; now 89% have degrees, according to the American Society of Newspaper Editors. But only 15.5% of the total population age 25 and older have finished college.

The median annual salary for “experienced reporters” working at newspapers with more than 250,000 daily circulation -- the 40 largest papers in the country -- was about $56,000 last year, according to a newspaper industry study. Pay for “senior reporters” -- and for top reporters and editors at the largest of these papers -- is substantially more. But median income for all U.S. workers over 15 is about $31,500.

In other words, many big-city journalists -- especially those who set the agenda for what gets covered in the rest of the media -- have moved away from much of the largely middle- and working-class audience they purport to serve. At best, they’re out of touch. At worst, they’ve become elitists.

The natural sympathy that most journalists feel for the underdog and for the downtrodden prevents the media from ignoring the poor. The fascination that the American public has with the rich and famous prevents the media from ignoring the upper strata of society. But newspapers seldom write about the middle class, the working class -- white- or blue-collar.

“We don’t write about them because we no longer live like them,” says Martin Baron, editor of the Boston Globe. “We live in other neighborhoods, and we don’t visit theirs. And I fear that there is a subtle disdain for their lives, their lifestyles, their material and spiritual aspirations.”

Today’s sophisticated, well-paid, well-educated journalists often have more in common with their sources -- government officials, university scientists, high-powered lawyers and businessmen -- than they do with their readers. In a sense, that’s not surprising. As the world has become more complex and more specialized, the better news organizations have tried to hire their own specialists -- reporters with law degrees to cover the courts, reporters with medical degrees to cover medicine, reporters who attend seminars and write books on various other specialized topics to cover those fields.

That helps create a more sophisticated news report. But it also helps create a serious disconnect between newspaper and reader.

The typical newspaper journalist today, according to research done by the American Society of Newspaper Editors, is “a liberal, college-educated, white, male baby boomer,” and too many of them are “elitists,” says Rick Rodriguez, executive editor of the Sacramento Bee.

“Not everybody on our staff gets paid superbly well,” Rodriguez says, “but the majority get paid reasonably well for Sacramento. That gives us a different perspective. We assume that everybody has air-conditioned cars and air-conditioned homes in Sacramento, where air-conditioning is needed. We assume that everyone can afford to take a vacation.

“When you start with those kinds of assumptions, it skews the kinds of stories we put our efforts into and how we approach them and what we don’t do.”

Moreover, most journalists try to maintain a kind of natural separation from their audience -- a professional detachment that they feel is essential to maintaining their professional standards of noninvolvement and nonpartisanship. Writing in USA Today last summer, Philip Meyer, who teaches journalism at the University of North Carolina, said this necessary professional detachment by journalists can lead to “a haughty indifference to all they survey.”

Professional detachment often leads to personal detachment -- detachment from most readers’ everyday concerns. That reinforces the elitist tendencies that come from education and a good income.

Sandra Mims Rowe, editor of the Portland Oregonian, recalls a newsroom discussion at the Oregonian this year about a state law requiring tax refunds to individuals, even though the state was in “dire financial shape.”

“The refund would amount to several hundred dollars per family,” Rowe says, “and our journalists were sitting around saying, ‘Why doesn’t the state do something about this law and balance the budget instead? A few hundred dollars isn’t that much.’ But to many of our readers, several hundred dollars is a lot of money, and we have to make sure our coverage isn’t biased in that way.”

The growing gap in income and education between journalists and most of their potential readers -- and the difference in values and lifestyles that often derive from that gap -- is a problem for newspapers already weakened by competitive pressures and declining public confidence, especially in a weak economy, with a rapidly growing immigrant population.

For years, editors have been saying, rightly, that they have to hire and promote more women and more minorities. But diversity should be -- well, more diverse. After all, college graduates -- male or female, white, black or brown -- don’t have a monopoly on the kinds of street smarts and life experience that make a good reporter.

Robert Rivard, editor of the San Antonio Express-News, says that when he was an editor at Newsweek in the mid-1980s, “I was not a college graduate, and I was determined to hire someone else who had not graduated from college, a blue-collar guy like me.”

He did just that, and he says his blue-collar reporter “did a great job, making connections that most of our other reporters didn’t necessarily see because of their own backgrounds.”

If other enterprising editors did the same thing today and hired a few bright people with blue-collar backgrounds who want to write and show some aptitude for journalism, they might find that -- with the right amount of instruction and supervision -- these nontraditional journalists would see some issues, make some connections and produce some stories that tend to elude their college-educated, upper-middle-class colleagues.

I suppose that in the ongoing economic slump, with newspaper profits down considerably from the recent glory years, some media overlords, more obsessed with the bottom line than with journalistic excellence, might offer a different potential solution -- cutting the pay of their reporters and editors significantly so they can share the problems, hardships and non-elitist attitudes of their readers.

Personally, I prefer Rivard’s approach.

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David Shaw can be reached at david.shaw@latimes.com