DAVID Gonzalez approached the South Bronx street-corner preacher and said he was from The New York Times.
“He had just been shouting fire, brimstone and eternal damnation,” recalled Mr. Gonzalez, at that time, in 1991, the Bronx bureau chief. But when the preacher heard the Times affiliation, his face brightened. “He told me that he really liked our opera coverage.”
It was a lesson in not making assumptions about just who reads The Times — a topic that I often hear about from readers who are frustrated by what they describe as elitism in the paper’s worldview, and who would like The Times and its staff to remember that the median household income in the United States is close to $52,000 a year, and that about 15 percent of Americans live in poverty.
It’s not hard to see why they feel that way. The featured apartments with their $10 million price tags and white-glove amenities seem aimed at hedge fund managers, if not Russian oligarchs. The stories on doughnuts at $20 a half dozen are for those who are flush with disposable income, not struggling to pay the rent. Many of the parties, the fashions, even the gadgets are well beyond the reach of the middle class.
It’s no secret that The Times often is intended to appeal to its many affluent readers and, at least sometimes, the advertisers who want to reach them. (Consider the ad-heavy special section produced twice a year and called, simply, “Wealth.”)
Claudia Griffiths, a reader in Maine, put it this way: “$160 flashlight and $219 level? Do the one percent of the one percent need your home-tool shopping help? Hello. Could the Times editors consider for WHOM they are actually writing? Here, not most Americans.”
Irene Lin of Washington, D.C., wrote that The Times “caters to upper-middle-class white cosmopolitan elites while being profoundly out of touch culturally and politically with most of America.”
So who is The Times written for — the superwealthy, or for citizens of all income levels? Is the paper trying, in the axiom about journalism’s mission, to “afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted”? Or is it plumping the Hungarian goose-down pillows of the already quite cozy?
I asked the executive editor, Dean Baquet, whom he has in mind when he directs coverage and priorities.
“I think of The Times reader as very well-educated, worldly and likely affluent,” he said. “But I think we have as many college professors as Wall Street bankers.”
On the question of all that high-end content, he called it “one of the bigger tensions” in The Times’s big picture. The paper has become expensive to subscribe to, and it is supported financially by advertisers who want to reach a high-earning readership, but “you don’t want to become an elitist news operation.” And it’s not just The Times that pitches to the rich, he said, noting that The Wall Street Journal’s real estate section is called “Mansion.”
Mr. Baquet said that stories about $56 million apartments and parents who buy houses near their children’s boarding schools are a legitimate part of the mix. But there are also stories about people struggling to get by, he noted. “You have to look at the whole of the report — and that is not elitist,” he said. “Are there parts of the paper aimed at an affluent audience? Yes, and that’s O.K., because it’s balanced out.”
Last year, I wrote a column about The Times’s coverage of poverty, observing that the quality of that coverage was often excellent but pushing for it to be more consistent and more plentiful. (Pew researchers have found that fewer than 1 percent of front-page newspaper stories, including those in The Times, dealt with poverty.)
Greg Kaufmann, the editor of TalkPoverty.org at the Center for American Progress, wrote to me recently to praise what he sees as The Times’s improved “commitment to covering poverty, inequality, and particularly the struggles of low-wage workers.” He praised stories on the proposed dismantling of the city’s workfare program and the comparatively high pay of fast-food workers in Denmark.
But he remains troubled by “articles tailored to the interests of the economic elite that really don’t do much for the rest of us.”
Here’s how I see it: There’s nothing inherently wrong with covering these subjects. And certainly The Times should cover haute cuisine, haute couture and all the other hautes. Not only do they often have news value but it also can’t be denied that the advertising revenue these articles help generate allows The Times to do the hard-hitting, expensive-to-produce journalism that is at the core of its mission. Many other news organizations can’t do these stories, in some cases because they can’t afford it.
But sometimes the tone and the emphasis and the mix are off, failing to acknowledge that this audience is a tiny slice of the American (not to mention global) economic pie. Self-awareness on the part of The Times — the mocking Twitter reaction to a headline about “artisanal parenting” comes to mind — and, yes, empathy, are sometimes missing in action. I was struck by a phrase of Mr. Gonzalez (whose background is, he said, “blue-collar, Puerto Rican, Catholic and South Bronx”): He tries to write about those who have less while keeping their “dignity intact.”
As Ginia Bellafante, who writes a column about life and policy in New York City — often about the poor and middle class — told me, “We can’t assume that every reference to a shoe, a store, a restaurant” is globally appreciated. At the same time, she said, The Times can’t ignore an important part of its audience: “Every affluent person in New York and every big city and its fancy suburbs reads The Times and they always have.”
What she tries to do in her column is broaden the perspective of those who “can be closed off to the experience of New York City beyond their immediate experience.”
In the end, the upscale doughnut and the penthouse apartment — lofty as they may be — have nothing to do with The Times’s highest purpose.
Recent Public Editor’s Journal posts took up Ebola coverage and reader criticism of an article about violence by Muslim extremists.