Bingo. Speaking of the Baltimore Sun, all those institutional forces that I mentioned were depicted pretty well, I thought, in the fifth season of the Wire in the episode “Doing More With Less.”

You could hire two green reporters fresh out of an Ivy League school for what it costs to pay one of the old-timers and they could be expected to have the base competency to churn out decent copy while a more senior news editor (Gus in the show) picks up the slack.

That generational shift is the heart of what I’m getting at. The New York Times still has a lot of veteran Boomer and GenX reporters that came up the old-fashioned way, but they’re dying off or retiring. And if you look at some of the local and regional papers, you’ll still find a lot reporters from lower-class backgrounds, too. My old coworker Phil from the Daily Texan got a job in Waco after graduation and now he’s working for the Austin-American Statesman.

But, at the end of the day, the composition of outlets like the New York Times has more impact because those papers have the ability to really set the agenda on a national level. That’s where proximity to power gets problematic.

As for the question you raise about why editors from lower-class backgrounds still hire the Ivy Leaguers—I think it has to do with risk. All else being equal, someone with a better education seems like a safer bet to a hiring manager or an editor. They’re basically outsourcing the cost of training which is borne by the applicant or—as is more likely the case—their parents. Someone from a minor school might have good clips and a different but they haven’t had the quality of training you would get a top-notch J-school.

An article I read in Columbia Journalism Review had an interesting take on this. The author Felix Salmon recommended just abolishing the J-School altogether.

Anyhow, thanks for reading and commenting!