Maddie Whitaker
Atlanta residents must rely on what the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (AJC) staff deems newsworthy. While the staff is a diverse group, do they tailor their information for a certain socioeconomic stratum that is not illustrative of a substantial portion of Atlantans?
It’s no secret that certain neighborhoods in metro Atlanta suffer from palpable poverty, their areas riddled with dilapidated houses and dangerous storefronts, while others enjoy their community pools, country-club memberships, and lavish mansions. If individuals from such different backgrounds and livelihoods can coexist in one city, they should be able to enjoy a similarly accommodating news source, right?
A new Bloomberg analysis based on U.S. Census Bureau calculations and the distribution of household income ranks Atlanta the most unequal large city in the United States. “The home to several Fortune 500 companies, such as Delta Air Lines Inc. and Coca-Cola Co., the city boasts extreme wealth, with many executives earning top-dollar salaries,” Bloomberg reported. However, at the same time, many residents work low-paying jobs in the hospitality and retail sector, with the city’s poverty rate sitting at 24 percent – or nearly one in four people. About 18% of Atlanta households earn an annual income of $150,000 or more, compared to 9.3% of households making less than $10,000 per year.
“Every city has some of these economic extremes. Atlanta just has them in spades,” Alan Berube, director of the Brooking Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program, told Bloomberg. “At the high end, it looks like one of the most successful American cities, like a San Francisco or a New York or a Washington. But as its low end, one of America’s poor cities.” After 2000, the Metro Atlanta economy suffered two major recessions. The more affluent communities were able to recover, but many of the area’s less affluent areas fell behind, according to Economic Innovation Group president John Lettieri. “They are living in a fundamentally different economy than the rest of us,” Lettieri said. “Distressed communities have had a 15-year recession.”
Impoverished people are less likely to seek out/receive quality news and information. Fiona Morgan, a consultant on information ecosystems and former director of Free Press’s community organizing News Voices program, notes that certain audiences get more news about their community than other communities.
This problem is only exacerbated by the continued closings of news organizations and the layoffs of talented journalists that characterize the demise of print media. In these understaffed studios, most stories will end up covering content that’s easy and cheap to produce, such as crime coverage, rather than those that narrate the deeper and more complicated issues that people most in need face.
Morgan’s colleague, Jay Hamilton, an economist and author of All the News That’s Fit to Sell, cites in his book four different kinds of information that are valuable to readers: entertainment demand, producer demand (information that is relevant to your line of work), consumer demand (any information surrounding a popular consumer good or service, and voter demand (any information that has to do with civic news). Hamilton explains that how media organizations make news out of these types of information determines what audiences become most valuable.
The five incentives for why organizations would want to supply you with information are as follows: subscription, advertising, voter advocacy, non-profit, and expression. Hamilton argues that these incentives are biased against low-income individuals, resulting in traditional news not being aimed at poorer communities. Low-income individuals have less to spend on subscriptions, and with print and local media on the downturn, we can only expect those to go up, as we’ve seen with the AJC. They’re also less likely to be the marginal consumer for many products, leaving advertisers in diminished need of their attention. They’re less likely to vote, so why target them with political information when the odds they even turn up to the polls are slim to none. There’s a clear bias in terms of incentive to create content for these residents, as often the information they do receive is that concerning payday lending, mortgages, and for-profit online education.
“One way I think about this is that newspapers used to offer a bundle of information, things that helped you in your life as a consumer or a worker,” Hamilton said. “Today, there’s a lot of focus, understandably, on people with high incomes and high education.” This observation is plausible for multiple reasons. One is that poverty has simply been placed on the back burner when it comes to media coverage, as it’s no longer considered breaking or urgent news. It’s a long-term problem that has been covered in length numerous times, so the incentive and motivation to pursue a new story on it is few and far between. Secondly, as mentioned earlier, the media have certain incentives when deciding what information to include in their news, and most of the time these have to do with some potential monetary outcome. People from high-income homes will be more likely to purchase subscriptions, respond to advertisements and react meaningfully to voter advocacy, so why not filter your news for them?
Because Atlanta is so densely populated with low-income individuals and neighborhoods below the poverty line, it is only reasonable to concur that their interests, issues, and voices are being left behind by major media organizations, such as the AJC, who are trying to stay afloat. While the AJC staff may have good intentions, their career is unfortunately one that may struggle to pay the bills, so they might be motivated to deliver to the only socioeconomic class that is able to help fund their salary. As a result, the news, interests, and voice of the sizeable portion of poorer Atlantans stands to be neglected. Furthermore, as discussed above, media incentives give way to information being targeted for high-income individuals, meaning much of the news produced by AJC could be, almost unintentionally, geared towards the very subset that keeps them in business, leaving those that could benefit from exposure and journalistic advocacy the most left to fend for themselves.