Picture from Aeon

Article in Columbia Journalism Review by Alissa Quartm=, 2/18/25

Headline:  “America Needs a Working-Class Media”

Subhead:  “Catering to rich audiences is not serving us.”

“n the seven years Kaia Sand edited Street Roots, a publication that serves unhoused people in Portland, Oregon, she would often find herself unsettled by how more mainstream publications covered the lives of poorer Americans. She’d find herself wondering, for instance, what the ‘real estate’ beat—whose very name offended her—had to do with the daily struggles of those she worked with. The 2024 presidential election underscored for her the need for a more class-aware and class-diverse media.

“Freelance reporter Joshua Hunt also looked at media through the lens of his lived experience of economic insecurity—he grew up working-class and Tlingit in Alaska but has recently moved abroad to Japan. Long frustrated with what he perceived as an industry inhospitable to journalists from poorer backgrounds, he recently fired off a tweetstorm about how few ‘editors go looking for working-class journalists.’ . . .”

https://www.cjr.org/analysis/america-needs-working-class-media-end-catering-rich-audiences.php