The city editor barked out an order to an all-but-abandoned newsroom in the middle of lunch hour.
“Get out there right now,” he said, pointing at me. “There’s a bank robbery going down and the cops have the guy surrounded.”
I was a medical reporter in Louisville at the time, but I grabbed a notebook and a pen and headed out with a photographer. The story the next day took up a full page.
It was high drama. A great story, made all the easier to get because the bank was across the street from the newspaper building.
Had the same crime taken place a few miles away on Louisville’s southside or across the mile-wide Ohio River in Indiana, it would have barely merited a police brief.
I think about that story, now 15 years later, every time we talk about coverage of Atlanta’s suburbs. The issue comes up frequently in public appearances I make and in questions sent to me from readers. Why don’t we pay more attention to what’s happening in the suburbs?
Big metro dailies are struggling to keep pace with the growth of the suburbs. As banks, law offices, department stores and corporate headquarters move out of the central cities, the most steadfast landowners remaining in America’s downtowns are often newspapers.
While some, including this one, have added satellite printing plants and news bureaus in the suburbs, most hold on to the central locations. The geographic center makes it easier to deliver their daily products to readers across the increasingly wide swaths of metro areas they serve.
There are other very tangible, and historic, ties between major newspapers and their core cities. Publishers and top newspaper executives are often key players in downtown business organizations. The owners can be important community philanthropists.
Most news reporters and editors work downtown, close to the government offices that dominate news coverage. Many reporters live within five or 10 miles of where they work. In such an environment, proximity often weighs heavily on newsworthiness.
Even as the suburbs boomed over the last few decades, newspapers established a hierarchy that treated suburban assignments as the farm club for reporters who one day hoped to be called up to the big leagues of city coverage. Instead, suburban readers became targets for weekly sections and zoned advertising supplements. Consistent daily news coverage was lacking in many large newspapers.
The economics of metropolitan growth are stacked against news organizations that cling to that old-school culture. A return to downtown living and the rebirth of inner cities may be in the works, but the vast majority of growth and prosperity continues to be in suburban areas.
Many big-city dailies have yet to come to grips with the new reality of “decentralized” urban areas and the diverse communities of interest around them. The Journal-Constitution has made great strides at positioning reporters, editors and photographers “out there.” Even the editorial board assigned writers geographic areas to watch over.
But most of us still spend 10- and 12-hour days working in a downtown environment that many readers rarely see or even feel the need to visit.
Conversely, we sometimes see suburban readers the way scientists view organisms under a microscope — if we inject this new feature or topic, how will they react?
It doesn’t help that some academics and more than a few journalists view the discussion as a great social and political issue — indeed, even a morality play — linking suburban life with all manner of ills, from environmental selfishness to racism. Suburban readers sense those value judgments in our news coverage and often ask if we think news about where they live is somehow less important.
We don’t and it isn’t.
The easiest news to cover is down the street from the newsroom. The rest requires not just being where our readers are but understanding them as well. The sooner newspapers treat suburban readers as their real audience and not a demographic target to hit, the better off they’ll be.
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Contact Mike King by e-mail at insideajc@ajc.com, by phone at 404-526-5819, by fax at 404-526-5611 or by writing P.O. Box 4689, Atlanta, GA 30302.
