The Media Should Move From Brooklyn To Pensacola
Over the course of my 5-week long trip that just concluded, one place I stopped was Pensacola, Florida. It was perfectly nice. More conservative than your average urban center, but still, nice. I even went to a vegan bakery/coffee shop. They’ve got those in Pensacola. One thing that Pensacola does not have, however, is any national political media.
Why is that? In theory, national political journalism could be conducted from anywhere. Sure, reporting on Congress, the White House, and the Supreme Court would necessitate being physically in Washington, DC, but most people who “report” on the news these days don’t do any in-person reporting — they sit cooped up behind their computers aggregating Twitter. It’d be just as possible to opine rashly on political affairs from behind your computer in Pensacola, FL as it would in Washington, DC or New York City. And yet, our esteemed media class chooses to “self-select” and concentrate overwhelmingly in a few exclusive locales.
I like Brooklyn just as much as the next guy. I’ve lived there. It’s great! But there are other great places in this vast expanse of a country that we’re all supposed to be reporting and commentating on. That so many people who run our media/culture industry are clustered in Brooklyn is a real problem for obvious reasons. I think a lot of the people in question are intuitively cognizant of why this is a problem, but they seldom do anything tangible to remedy it.
One tangible thing they could do: pack up your bags, give notice on your lease, and move someplace else. I would really like to know why a national political media outlet is obligated to be based in New York City or Washington, DC, when technology allows us to do our jobs from essentially anywhere. You could theoretically do it from Antarctica. That’s a little far-fetched, but why not consider relocating to Asheville, NC or Mobile, AL? Perfectly serviceable cities with interesting subcultures and plenty to report on locally. How about New Orleans? One of the most peculiar (in a good way) and unique cities on earth, and it has no national media presence.
Ironically, in the pre-internet era, New Orleans would have some semblance of a national media presence, because the Times-Picayune or some other regional newspaper would send correspondents to Washington, DC to ensure that its readership was in some sense “represented” there. But we don’t really have that any more. Again, it’s really the height of irony: despite the immense relative ease of “production” that the internet has afforded the journalism industry, the industry has nonetheless clustered in a few select coastal urban enclaves.
They do this clustering for reasons that are fundamentally cultural. If you’ve got a national media “brand” to burnish, you want to be in the nation’s cultural epicenter, and that would be New York City. I can’t say I really even particularly blame them; New York City is wondrous. (Fusion, based in Miami, would be one exception here, so good for them. CNN used to be based in Atlanta, but now that’s really just its corporate HQ — they are essentially based in Manhattan. And by the way, Fox News, which purports to represent the heartland of America, is also based in Manhattan.)
Neiman Lab had a good story on this effect a couple months ago:
So we concentrate virtually all of our political journalism in about four places total (New York, Washington DC, San Francisco, to some extent Los Angeles) and then wonder why we don’t pick up on trends occurrent in far-off places, hundreds of miles away, where there is no national media presence. Really? Is this shocking? It shouldn’t be shocking at all. It’s expected and foreseeable. Thus, Trump.
The political media has feigned a desire to “introspect” since the election, but they won’t take any tangible steps to actually address why it is that they got everything so spectacularly wrong. We urgently need greater geographic diversity in the national media. If these “introspective” types were really serious about doing things differently, they’d set up shop in Pensacola.
