Why big cities make media liberal

It’s all very well and good to argue that newspapers lack regional diversity, as Rubin does, except this ignores the fundamental historic organizing principle of newspapers: geography.

American newspapers originated as physical objects designed to be distributed in defined, geographically constrained regions. They originated as urban creations because only in urban areas was there enough commerce, enough politics — enough news — for them to grow, and enough readers to make them strong. There are newspapers based in rural areas, but it is hard for them to grow large, both because of the lack of regional news, and because of the difficulty of getting the physical object of the paper to enough people to scale it. Newspapers have historically depended on high densities of people for their existence (see Discovering The News: A Social History Of American Newspapers, for a really wonderful and fun history of the form).

Newspapers have also, at least until rather recently, demanded that their writers know a region. Not before they got hired, but once they started to work in it. Papers may have hired from diverse regional backgrounds (and newspapers draw from a more geographically and educationally diverse population of reporters than Rubin thinks they do), but what they demanded of their workers is that they become regional specialists. That’s what running people through the Metro Desk was designed to do. Until fairly recently, to report on national politics, you had to get to know the problems of the city or of dense close-in suburbs first. You had to take a crash course in the culture of the city and the region in which your newspaper was based.