Featured Photo by Element5 Digital on Unsplash
If we want democracy to be truly democratic, then journalism needs to stop ignoring low-income people.
Low-income communities are ignored or mistreated by journalism, and mainstream media doesn’t really care because they aren’t the ‘right’ audience.’
For over two decades, the journalism industry has been wracked with a financial crisis. The fall of the advertisement-based business model and the flood of free online news are two of the oft-cited reasons for our dramatic upheaval – one that came with mass layoffs and shuttered local papers, creating news deserts across Canada and the United States. Journalists started hearing about how they could make themselves stand out to employers by simply ’becoming entrepreneurs’, and news companies started looking for ways to make money – and if they couldn’t, they were bought out by giant media conglomerates. Concurrent with our industry’s reckoning, democracy began to crumble – the consequences of which we’ve seen especially in recent years with events like the January Insurrection, mass shootings and other examples of white nationalist domestic terrorism. Journalism’s financial crisis and democracy’s nightmare are not isolated incidents; rather, they are interwoven since “when democracy falters, journalism falters, and when journalism goes awry, democracy goes awry” (Carey 13).
While journalism and democracy have fought to survive, they’ve both continued a strong trend from journalism’s heyday: completely ignoring or, in many cases, harming people who arguably need journalism the most — low-income communities. However, these communities deserve access to good and useful information since we are all citizens of democracy… right?
“The Digital Divide”
Industry professionals are aware that journalism ignores poor people’s information needs but are puzzled about a solution. Fiona Morgan and Jay Hamilton, journalism scholars, make that abundantly clear in an interview with Christine Schmidt for Nieman Labs: “It’s a known but not discussed issue for journalists, that you know there are always stories that aren’t getting told. Also known but not discussed is that certain audiences get more news about their community than other communities do.” To make matters worse, there is a lack of positive information – meaning useful and truthful information – in low-income communities, so there is space for a lot of negative information to circulate. Morgan and Hamilton observe that “the digital divide” is ever-present “in terms of technology [and] content.” Low-income people are often “the target consumers” for sketchy products and services; sadly, “that means people will create deceptive information targeted at them” (Schmidt). With a lack of good information, not only are people’s concerns going unaddressed and people with power over them going without accountability, but these communities can also become infested with predatory content.
Journalists are not incentivized to give low-income communities access to information
Journalists battle precarious working conditions brought about by the financial crisis and face newsrooms that often don’t value marginalized voices; including those belonging to disabled people, people of colour, poor people, and queer people. Those who still work in the mainstream media are constricted to their editors’ and organizations’ values – and often, that value is money.
The capitalist interests in journalism are proven by what Morgan and Hamilton refer to as the five incentives for providing someone with information. These incentives include: subscription fees, advertisement revenue, gaining a vote, changing someone’s mind, and expressing yourself; most of which are “biased against the information needs of low-income individuals” who have less money and are less likely to vote (Schmidt).
Is there a way forward?
The concurrent crises of finance and diversity, plus the lack of incentives for journalists, explains journalism’s failure to serve low-income communities – not counting the historically-present biases against those communities – but does not excuse it. Low-income people deserve access to good quality information even if they can’t afford to pay for it – so how do we get it to them? And better yet, how do we ensure we are giving them information they deem necessary and useful?
We can look to some examples, such as nonprofit newspapers and innovators such as Hearken. For a Canadian example of a nonprofit, The Narwhal is a leading news site focusing on investigative climate journalism. While the nonprofit model is a great way to alleviate the financial crisis facing journalism, the issue is that they may not be able to cater to the information needs of low-income communities depending on the mission, which informs their donor networks. The Hearken model, on the other hand, is very promising. Created in the United States, Hearken is working to democratize local news coverage by having community members submit questions they want to be answered and having their journalists answer them. If a nonprofit site can adopt the Hearken model specifically with low-income communities in mind, it could have a tremendous benefit since the journalists would not need to adhere to corporate interests for sustainability, and the community members could be directly involved in the news-making process.
Unfortunately, though, both of these solutions do nothing to fix the actual issue: journalism has to start valuing people it can’t use to make money. If we want to help ensure democracy is salvaged and gets stronger with time, we need to make sure it becomes more equitable, which means creating information for everyone. While a cultural revolution against capitalist interests invading journalism would be ideal, a realistic way to start moving forward is to include those who have been notoriously neglected.
References:
“Hearken for Democracy.” Hearken, https://wearehearken.com/for-democracy/
Green, Mike. “Developing the Entrepreneurial Mindset.” Rebus, 2017 August, https://press.rebus.community/media-innovation-and-entrepreneurship/chapter/developing-entrepreneurial-mindset/
Lepore, Jill. “Does journalism have a future?” The New Yorker, 2019 January 21, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/01/28/does-journalism-have-a-future
“New York Times poised for first mass staff walkout in 40 years.” The Guardian, 2022 December 8, https://theguardian.com/media/2022/dec/07/new-york-times-strike-walkout
The Narwhal, https://thenarwhal.ca/
Schmidt, Christine. “‘Known but not discussed’: Low-income people aren’t getting quality news and information. What can the industry do about it?” NiemanLab, 2018 July 30, https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/07/known-but-not-discussed-low-income-people-arent-getting-quality-news-and-information-what-can-the-industry-do-about-it/