Business rationale
From Banyan Project
As America’s income and wealth gap has widened, so has the journalism gap. The trouble is, contemporary journalism -– the major newspapers, broadcast and cable news, even AP and Reuters –- is almost exclusively aimed at serving the interests of the “have” side of the gap and is written in ways that fit the “have” worldview.
For example, the Labor Department’s monthly unemployment and job creation reports are covered in terms of their impact on the broad economy and on the stock market, not on their impact on a working person’s prospects for getting a better job; newspaper health features tend to presume that people have medical insurance; food sections often focus on gourmet entertaining. Banyan will provide journalism tailored to serve the regular folks of America whose distinct life and citizenship needs are all but ignored by the corporate mainstream media.
The mainstream media aim their coverage at the affluent because of their heavy dependency on revenue from advertisers that sell upscale products and services and thus want to pay for circulation only among the affluent; less-than-affluent people are considered “waste readers” because they tend to shop at Walmart and other discounters that rarely advertise.
Thus the mainstream media are inextricably entangled in a conflict between the interests of the advertisers that supply their profits and the interests of the majority of their potential readers who don’t fit their advertisers’ target markets. So it is for good reason that less-than-affluent people feel deeply distrustful of the media: Not only do the media offer them little that’s relevant to their lives, they also show them no respect and in fact have discarded them. Newspaper readership trends provide a vivid measurement of this distrust: Statistics from the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press show people in households that earn less than $50,000 giving up on newspapers at a far higher rate than people earning more. Literally millions of Americans have given up on newspapers in the last decade, most of the less-than-affluent.
So Banyan will strive to develop a dominant brand and franchise for serving the life and citizenship information needs of the huge audience of less-than-affluent Americans, which we call the Banyan public.
