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Where's Working-Class Media? (Columbia Journalism Review) [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-02-23
This essay by Alissa Quart ties lack of concern of working class issues to the need for non-corporate outlets and for better socialization, if you will, of journalists during their training.
The identity crisis of the Democratic Party—and debate over the extent to which the party should identify with the working class—unfolds as I write this; see Bernie Sanders’s, Faiz Shakir’s, and other progressive politicians’ and media figures’ refrain that the party pursued donors and ignored the working class in the 2024 electoral campaign. And if that balance of power must change, the media should be similarly realigned.
I’ll note that the essay uses the term “precariat,” which is a social stratum characterized by a precarious living.
What would that media look like? It would be one where economic reporters are embedded in blue-collar communities and neighborhoods rather than financial districts, and source networks built around people with direct experience instead of outside analysts. Centering inflation coverage around wage stagnation rather than the stock market and written for people who live paycheck to paycheck. Healthcare reporting would be conducted by those who have experienced medical debt. Labor reporting that represents workers not as mute sufferers but as true experts. Housing that is considered from the perspective of the renter, not the landlord or developer.
While there are examples from the past in the essay, let’s also remember that local weekly papers were not hotbeds of top-college-program journalists and were typically “embedded” in their communities. Many of those that still exist are just satellites of a larger (but still boring and news-lite) publication.
See www.cjr.org/… for the full read, which includes suggestions about creating such media outlets.
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