The usually annoying David Shaw pulls off an interesting article in last weekend’s LA Times (obtrusive registration required, use ‘laexaminer’/’laexaminer’) on the social end economic gap between newly professionalized journalists and the ‘average reader’ they are trying to connect with.

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.
…
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.

He looks at it from a media marketing point of view, but it is also another piece in the puzzle I’ve been playing with lately.
The overall picture isn’t clear, but I’m thinking that the disconnect between the people who think and write about stuff for a living and those who make and do stuff for a living is fairly large…and that the impacts of that disconnect, in politics, economics, and social development are even larger.