But wait, you’re thinking. It’s not the job of the Times to write for the residents of Massillon, Ohio!

Of course not. So let’s take a look at who is producing journalism for Massillon, Ohio.

The newspaper editor quoted in the Times piece — Michael Hanke — is a local treasure, widely credited with making his newspaper, The Repository, one of the best of its size. In 2006, the paper went through sweeping cuts to make it more attractive to buyers. The Repository now belongs to a chain that belongs to a private equity firm, and Mr. Hanke is out of a job.



Figures collected by the Bureau of Labor Statistics show that the number of working journalists in the Canton-Massillon area stood at 110 in the year 2000. Last year, that number was down to 50.

It’s a story playing out in news deserts emerging around the country: online news erodes local print subscriptions; when papers try to follow their audience online, giant platforms like Google and Facebook capture the lion’s share of the advertising dollar; and consolidation has left many such papers in the hands of investors whose only response is steep newsroom cuts to prop up profit margins.

But that’s only half the story of what’s happening to news — because the number of working journalists hasn’t been dropping everywhere.

During the same period that Canton-Massillon lost 55% of its working journalists, the number of journalists employed in Washington, DC was on the rise. In 2000, the number stood at 1630. In 2015, it was 2500 — an increase of 53%.

The digital revolution hasn’t just changed journalism, it’s moved it.

Old media technologies organized us into audiences defined by where we lived. New media organize us into national audiences defined by what we believe.

For traditional media, distribution was tethered to a printing press or a broadcast tower — our range was limited to our region.

The internet means your distribution reaches everywhere— and competitors can reach your audience from anywhere. The incentives all point toward scale — and scale means national. For new launches, that’s meant setting up offices in Washington to cover politics, New York to cover finance, Los Angeles to cover entertainment, and maybe San Francisco to cover tech. Everywhere else . . . pretty much doesn’t matter.

So we get starved of local news, and stuffed with national. And if you are in Massillon, Ohio, “the media” is less likely to conjure images of the reporter covering city council, and more and more likely to be some hip urbanite writing for Vox, Fusion, Slate, Politico, Buzzfeed, or a national newspaper like The New York Times — any of whom might occasionally write about you, but none of whom are writing for you.

Old media technologies organized us into audiences defined by where we lived. New media organize us into national audiences defined by what we believe — fueling the rise of the so-called “filter bubble.”

It’s not just happening to audiences. The combination of scarce jobs and concentration in a handful of cities has applied an impressive filter to the people working in journalism as well. Today’s hires are more competitive: they skew towards applicants with expensive graduate degrees, applicants with experience from unpaid internships, and applicants who can afford astronomical rents in an expensive city while they’re trying to break in to the industry. Who gets left out? Almost everyone who doesn’t have family wealth to fall back on. People who once would have gotten their start at one of our disappearing small-city papers.

Research in the UK (which takes the time to collect statistics about things like social class) shows that, on average, younger professional journalists grew up in much wealthier households than their older colleagues. That same research now ranks journalism as the country’s third most socially exclusive profession (just behind doctors and lawyers).

So, why does someone like Donald Trump get so much mileage out of beating up on “the media”? Because, increasingly, we are a bunch of middle- to upper-class urbanites, clustered in a handful of coastal cities, writing about most of the country, instead of for it. As our local footprint has contracted, so has our public service function.

Increasingly, we are a bunch of middle- to upper-class urbanites, clustered in a handful of coastal cities, writing about most of the country, instead of for it.

People trust local news more than national. People who consume local news show higher levels of civic engagement. That translates to political accountability: academic research shows that when media markets have a close overlap with congressional districts (and therefore produce more coverage of a given representative), then incumbents are 1) more likely to be unseated, 2) more likely to vote against their party line, and 3) bring more federal funding, on average, to their districts.

And that’s just what’s measurable. Imagine if we could total up the impact this country’s local newspapers and broadcasters have had on the conduct of city and county officials, on police and housing agencies, how much corruption they’ve prevented — just by creating the expectation it would be exposed. Then ask yourself: what is the cost of stories that we’ve missed as we’ve shrunk?