Here No Evil, SUV No Evil: Is suburbia anathema to reporters?

JANUARY 21, 2002 -- Newspaper publishers know the suburbs are critical to the growth of the business. If they've had mixed success, it's not for lack of trying, as they have poured millions of dollars into hiring additional staff and producing zoned community sections. What they may not realize is that part of the problem may be right in their own house.

For a host of reasons, journalists tend to look askance at covering the suburbs.

The problem isn't trivial. Half the U.S. population lives in the suburbs today, more than double the slice of 50 years ago, while cities are, for the most part, losing residents. Urban centers are increasingly becoming places where people come only to work, but that, too, is changing as jobs continue moving out of downtown.

No newspaper knows this better than The Philadelphia Inquirer, which has seen circulation plunge as its market has made a massive shift from the city to its suburbs. This shift has given rise to multiple suburban initiatives by the paper, and is expected to be a top priority of its new editor, Walker Lundy.

For the growing number of people who are not just living but working in suburbia, city news is likely to grow ever less important. Still, they are potential newspaper readers -- and the kind of people advertisers want to reach. "The people who the newspapers really need are moving to the suburbs," says Kenneth M. Johnson, a demographer at Loyola University Chicago.

Yet newspapers' credibility with those same people is at risk. This is nothing new. American Society of Newspaper Editors' research shows that people distrust what they read in newspapers. And one reason, when it comes to suburban stories, is that journalists, by and large, aren't like the people they cover.

According to studies done by a number of suburban newspapers, their readers are more likely to be female, have higher household income and education, and be in traditional families than are the readers of metro dailies, says Nancy Lane, executive director of Suburban Newspapers of America (SNA). Peter Brown, an editor at the Orlando (Fla.) Sentinel, surveyed journalists in the Dallas-Fort Worth market and five smaller cities in the early 1990s, and found that journalists are less likely to marry, have children, and own homes than the people they write for. No doubt this is partly due to the mobile nature of the profession.

"Journalists don't live in the suburbs, don't want to live in the suburbs, and to some extent see the suburban lifestyle as unworthy," Brown says.

Some have what could be called an "elitist" attitude. This is not based on class, for, in many cases, the reporter makes less money than the suburban subject of his or her story. It's more of a cultural elitism. In this view, shopping malls and sport utility vehicles, along with other symbols of suburbia, may be seen as scourges.

Considering that, for some metros, the suburbs make up the biggest part of their market, this divergence has broad implications for newspapers' ability to grow.

"The daily newspaper is its own worst enemy," says the SNA's Lane. "They have people who would rather not be covering suburban news, they're not always people who are local to the area [and] understand community news -- and it shows in the coverage."

Ross Mackenzie, editor of the editorial pages for the Richmond (Va.) Times-Dispatch, argued in the September 1997 issue of The American Editor that a major reason for newspapers' declining credibility is journalists' alleged liberal bias, which skews just about everything: story choice, placement, and emphasis. The more conservative public is wise to it, he wrote, and is turning away.

Any ideological divide would pose a special problem in the suburbs, which traditionally lean to the political right.

"I do think, broadly, there may be a disconnect between prevalent newsroom values and a large cohort of readers [that] newspapers are targeting, or should be targeting, for newspaper growth," Mackenzie tells E&P.

An obvious way to grow circulation is to write about what readers want to read about, and in suburbia, hot topics are more likely to be school, family, and commuting issues than news with a city dateline. "The community agate -- the police log, real-estate sales -- is some of the best-read stuff in the weeklies," says Christine D. Urban, president of Sharon, Mass.-based Urban & Associates Inc., a newspaper research and consulting firm. "That's a niche that weeklies have taken a really strong hold of."

Journalists, however, would rather write about such ideologically driven issues as the environment, Mackenzie says, which "may in fact be important issues, but they may not be issues the public wants to read about."

Metropolitan newspaper editors have treated the suburbs as a second-class beat by assigning less experienced, lower-paid reporters to cover suburban news, ordering fluff stories, and ghettoizing the coverage in community news sections.

No wonder, then, that metro reporters traditionally have taken suburban assignments grudgingly. Malcolm A. Borg, chairman of North Jersey Media Group Inc., parent of The Record in Hackensack, N.J., has come across this attitude in his own building, from where reporters can see Manhattan, home of The New York Times. However, he points out, "We're a suburban newspaper, and [to us] the suburbs are a lot more important than Afghanistan."

The irony is that suburban coverage often requires more sophisticated journalistic skills than the city-hall beat because the suburbs lack the power centers and institutions reporters are used to relying on for news.

Despite growing efforts by editors to address this prejudice, the problem persists. Editors have ingrained in reporters that the suburbs are "where you're put out to pasture," says Ben Marrison, editor of The Columbus (Ohio) Dispatch.

So while reporters often take the blame for inferior suburban coverage, says Jan Schaffer, executive director of the Pew Center for Civic Journalism in Washington, "I also think it's up to the news organization to reward coverage of suburbs with play in the paper, salary, and the opportunity to do meatier stories."

Re-education needs to start even earlier, though. Journalism schools should do their part to elevate suburban coverage, Urban says.

Some papers, such as The Washington Post, get it. The paper has been shifting its attention to the suburbs since the 1960s, in response to the District of Columbia's rapid urban exodus. Leonard Downie Jr., the paper's executive editor, says getting into the suburbs early is one reason the Post has a high circulation penetration among papers its size. The Post has emphasized hiring top-notch people to work in its suburban bureaus, and occasionally plucks people from its bureaus to cover national and foreign news. "This is a really mobile newsroom," Downie says. "There's no sense that you're isolated anywhere."

Efforts to raise the profile of suburban news and get reporters out into the communities are afoot in other newsrooms.

The Columbus Dispatch and The Arizona Republic in Phoenix, for example, have assigned some of their best staffers to cover the growing communities outside the city. Dispatch reporters are encouraged to look for suburban trend stories and integrate the suburbs into topical stories. "That stigma of being a suburban writer is being forcibly eroded," Editor Marrison says.

After The Denver Post created five suburban bureaus, "I got very good results from people who live in the suburbs who covered the suburbs," says Frank J. Scandale, a former editor there.

A few papers have tried residency requirements to improve their suburban coverage. Staffers on the Houston Chronicle's suburban desk are required to live in the areas they cover, a policy that's paid off in better stories, says Managing Editor Tommy Miller. "They get to know their sources, they know the area, and they have a real interest in the area," he says.

Residency requirements may be impractical in recruiting, given how often reporters are reassigned, but some editors have tried other ways to get staffers more familiar with outlying areas. At The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, editorial writers must spend at least one day a week in a designated suburban bureau.

For metros competing with already entrenched community papers, such efforts may only go so far. If they want staffers who really understand the communities they cover, dailies might consider hiring reporters from competing suburban papers, the SNA's Lane says.

The dynamic nature of America's suburbs will only make it more important for newspapers to understand their markets.

Suburbs are losing their collective identity as they become increasingly diverse. Racial and ethnic minorities made up 27% of suburban populations in 2000, up from 19% in 1990, according to demographer William H. Frey of the Milken Institute in Santa Monica, Calif. At the same time, he says, middle-class whites and blacks are migrating from the Northeast and West Coast to the Southeast and West, changing the political tenor of those communities.

One thing is certain: Papers that persist in ignoring their suburban readers' interests risk alienating that segment. A business that doesn't understand and respect its customers will soon find those customers going elsewhere.

Kevin Convey, editor for Community Newspaper Co., the Herald Media Inc. subsidiary that publishes some 100 small papers serving suburban Boston, believes that the arrogance he sees displayed by metro dailies can be a "tremendous obstacle" to gaining the respect of suburban readers.

"Let's face it," he says. "Nobody likes to be looked down upon. ... And they certainly don't like to be looked down upon by a young ambitious reporter who feels like he's wasting his time covering a zoning board meeting."

I think this is an interesting article, not just from a journalistic standpoint, but from a sociological one, too. I didn't realize that half the population lives in suburbs.

I thought it was rather interesting to note that the guy actually noticed that newspaper articles are written from a leftist point of view, yet the readers they are trying to reach are decidedly more conservative. Say what you will, at least on that point, this guy was dead on the money.

It's an imporant factor. And what makes it the more noteable, is that these writers are almost incapable of comprehending this dynamic.

BTTT

They KNOW they're doing an awful job, but the Leninists who rule the newsrooms continue to prevent rational redeployment of assets and coverage.

A lot of the people who go into journalism daydream about covering colorful union leaders and gritty city streets, not high school band competitions and new subdivisions. They have a romantic view of newspaper work. I know I did when I first began.

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