The disconnect between the Globe and the city it's based in

At the recent Media Giraffe conference at UMass-Amherst, longtime reporter/editor Tom Stites discussed the ultimate yuppification of American newspapers and what that means for democracy.

He pretends he's a single mother of three living in East Boston who rides the Blue Line to her low-pay, no-health-insurance job near Downtown Crossing.

Then he picks up a random copy of the Globe to see if any of the major stories in the paper have any relevancy to her: There are stories about the BSO, vacationing on the Cape, WCRB, the still-expensive price of houses in Massachusetts and a column by some guy who wants to force workers to save money because they're too stupid to do it themselves. Oh, yeah, then there's Sidekick, with a front-page feature on a restaurant selling a five-pound lobster meal.

... [T]he Globe I just picked apart has no stories offering people with no heath coverage strategies for getting care without going bankrupt. Or pieces about how the state gigs low-income people with the lottery. Or analyses of the job market for weekly wage earners. Or a myriad of other things that are crucial to the lives of people the newspapers no longer care about. ...

Long piece, but worth the read if you still think newspapers can or should be relevant to democracy.

Via John Daley, who admits to finding fault with the Globe's mania for leafy suburbanites.