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This story was copublished with and supported by the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, a nonprofit organization that supports journalists.
In 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.” Why don’t they? “Well, the short answer is: tradition.” When I emailed him, he elaborated: “In cases like mine, when someone from an impoverished background makes it to the kind of elite institutions from which top newspapers and magazines hire staff, there is a tendency, I think, to want to fit in by obscuring one’s background.” As a result, he says, the rare working-class reporters “who somehow make it through that gantlet” start representing “poverty and class through the same lens” as their more privileged media peers.
For Sand and Hunt, there is a clear understanding of what must be done. America needs a working-class media. It’s something that has preoccupied me for years. If we thought of it as precariat media, we would also include the falling middle class that I have called the middle precariat (including most freelance writers right now). After the 2024 election, the punditocracy has seemingly rediscovered the working-class voter for the second time—following Donald Trump’s first victory, when J.D. Vance’s book Hillbilly Elegy emerged to “explain” the rage of those left behind economically. Neither time, however, did they “rediscover” the value of working-class journalists.
The identity crisis of the Democratic Party—and debate over the extent to which the party should identify with the working class—unfolds as I write this; see Bernie Sanders’s, Faiz Shakir’s, and other progressive politicians’ and media figures’ refrain that the party pursued donors and ignored the working class in the 2024 electoral campaign. And if that balance of power must change, the media should be similarly realigned.
As the executive director of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, a nonprofit for, about, and by working Americans, whose journalists are themselves experiencing economic struggle, I have long felt that there were too few people from non-elite backgrounds in the field. That’s why I have spent more than a decade advocating for what we might think of as working people’s media. (I helped create EHRP with the late Barbara Ehrenreich, where I edited both Sand and Hunt.)
What would that media look like? It would be one where economic reporters are embedded in blue-collar communities and neighborhoods rather than financial districts, and source networks built around people with direct experience instead of outside analysts. Centering inflation coverage around wage stagnation rather than the stock market and written for people who live paycheck to paycheck. Healthcare reporting would be conducted by those who have experienced medical debt. Labor reporting that represents workers not as mute sufferers but as true experts. Housing that is considered from the perspective of the renter, not the landlord or developer.
Some examples of publications where this is happening include small entities like the housing publication Shelterforce but also, on occasion, legacy publications, for example Esquire, which recently published “The Invisible Man,” an excellent firsthand account of homelessness.
While Americans in polls report historically low levels of trust in the media, it could be in large part because much of the press hasn’t been speaking to the concerns of their everyday lives. It would mean incorporating the knowledge and skills of reporters like Heather Bryant, who grew up in rural Missouri, where her lower-income family would buy a newspaper only to obtain something particular from its pages, usually from the classifieds. (I wrote in depth about Bryant’s experience for CJR.) Today, she’s a professional reporter and editor. Not seeing her family and community reflected in the media guided her work to seek out reporters from a wide background of educational and lived experiences, as she puts it.
“We desperately need a working-class media—very little in our current media ecosystem directly addresses poor Americans,” says Victor Pickard, a professor of media studies in the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. The main reason for its absence, he says, is that media owners are “dedicated to making as much money as possible.” This is especially true in the US, whose media depend on advertisers and the wealthy audiences they love (of course, advertising is increasingly hard to come by, amid the generally dire media landscape).
As Christopher Martin, author of the 2019 book No Longer Newsworthy: How the Mainstream Media Abandoned the Working Class, told me: “Media has increasingly centered on a class audience rather than a mass audience.”
Catering to richer audiences, however, is not serving us. What’s the use of a media that centers Americans who take their pets to private dog runs or dine at Eleven Madison Park? Why not feature people who follow the recent Starbucks strikes because they were once baristas, not because they’re addicted to seven-dollar Cinnamon Dolce Lattes?
A working-class-focused media could be supported by the dozens of media-oriented philanthropies and local news initiatives funded by taxpayers, like the recent ones in New Jersey and California, as well as independent media cooperatives—people pooling resources to create real alternatives to corporate media. As Pickard has written, public funding could support these initiatives through community trusts, so media would be owned by and accountable to working people. Among the best of the media cooperative ventures are Hell Gate, which covers New York City, and The Appeal, which focuses on criminal justice.
There’s also philanthropy, of course, though foundations, endowments, and individual donors that support journalism have of late focused on local news. But in my view, Big Philanthropy is missing the plot if these publications are not precariat-oriented. Local nonprofit media should pivot around class-aware approaches, topics, and reporters, and not just geography. Funders should be aiming to reach working-class readers and viewers, first and foremost.
We can look to history for antecedents including twentieth-century labor publications and Black newspapers and The Vanguard, the voice of Seattle’s unemployed during the early 1930s. In fact, from the 1930s to the 1950s, partly in response to global economic strife and ultimately world war, there were new venues and methods for journalism that sought to engage less affluent audiences and from less consumerist perspectives.
There was, for example, the famed Daily Worker, which emerged out of Ohio in the 1920s, and had its heyday during the 1930s popular front. It was founded by communists and advanced a Marxist social critique but also had an active sports page, which today seems like an oxymoron. Or take the left-leaning 1940s paper PM, which was solely funded by Marshall Field III and refused advertising in order not to be beholden to business interests, at least until Field got tired of paying all the bills. I.F. (Izzy) Stone was its Washington correspondent and Weegee was one of its photographers. (Later, the class-aware perspective was taken up by Ramparts, a New Left political and literary magazine that was published from 1962 to 1975, with great graphics.)
They were part of a media ecosystem that made these and other publications more economically viable. In the intervening years, of course, there were plenty of radical zines and blogs, including, say, the Occupied Wall Street Journal, created on a printing press in Zuccotti Park in the fall of 2011 for the Occupy crowd and numbering in the tens of thousands of copies.
For many papers, the diminution of covering working-class-aligned issues corresponded with a shift in ownership of newspapers to chains and corporations—and a new focus on an upscale audience—in the 1980s and ’90s. (One cause was the 1996 Telecommunications Act and related activity.) Corporate-owned, profit-driven media naturally looked to upscale readers who could buy the costly perfumes displayed in costly ads. As a result, a transit strike, for instance, would get told as the tale of unhappy straphangers, while articles on the workplace morphed into discussions of what to wear on casual Fridays. Martin correlates this with the Republican strategy of “picking off the white working class” through conservative broadcasters like Fox News (founded in 1996) and now the far-right media. As media scholar Reece Peck writes in his 2018 book Fox Populism: Branding Conservatism as Working Class, Fox’s media makers succeeded in stealing a white working-class audience by appealing to that group’s tastes and so-called morality, as well as by bringing together two class-based strands of American life, ostensibly populist politics and tabloid journalism.
This brings us to where we are today with faux-prole Republican journalists, a kind of social-class kitsch of Rogan-ish dudes on barstools with podcasts.
So how can we address this imbalance? For starters, labor unions and the labor movement could and should devote more resources toward a robust ecosystem for working-class journalism—from reporting grants and fellowships to awards programs that celebrate this work. They could even create their own media outlets. And there are more than a few examples of media cooperative ownership models: while these aren’t always explicitly working-class media, they are its close cousin, a “working journalists’ media.”
Media unions have a crucial role to play, especially if they win strong contracts that can better protect working-class journalists from being pushed out of the industry. Nonprofits like EHRP can also support this transformation by helping working-class journalists stay in the field and produce meaningful work.
Improving journalism education is another ingredient that can help create a working-class media—expanding scholarship programs and paid apprenticeships for working-class students entering journalism. In addition, journalism schools should develop curricula focused on labor and economic-justice reporting, build partnerships with labor organizations, and support student publications that center working communities. This could vastly improve the pipeline of journalists equipped to tell the stories of workers more effectively.
Existing legacy and commercial media could also train their middle-class contributors in what I think of as “class-aware reporting.” Instead of hand-wringing about how Trump’s voters hate traditional news and love antisocial social media—and how some of those on the left have also come to despise the New York Times—legacy media outlets’ reporters might change their publications’ emphasis on covering elite preoccupations from upscale angles. That, I think, might not bring back the working-class readership, but would less actively repel them.
We are now, of course, also facing even more mass buyouts and layoffs than usual. Last year, fifteen thousand media jobs were lost. This year is already trending badly for newspeople, as HuffPost cut 22 percent of its workforce and CNN scythed as well. Of course, one wonders if this could, counterintuitively, stimulate a movement for more class-aware reporting. Couldn’t those fewer and fewer reporters left standing start to see themselves as a precarious and endangered group, constantly buffeted by fickle and self-centered owners, far closer to the vulnerable populations they report on than to the rich? I’d like to think so, but nowadays I tend to check my optimism at the door.
The working-class reporters my organization supports have truly illuminated the conditions of Americans in ways I could have previously only guessed at. I am thinking of a piece on a working-class media by Carla Murphy, which EHRP commissioned, in which she framed the Statue of Liberty as a blue-collar media artifact, or the writing of Ann Larson, who worked in a grocery store during the pandemic. Finally, there’s Bobbi Dempsey’s piece on her mother’s inability to afford a hearing aid—a first-person testimony in the successful national effort to lower their cost.
But there are many other reporters like these out there. And it’s not too late for their voices to be heard and absorbed.
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