MATT WELCH writes that newspapers are abandoning their non-rich readers:

In 2003, publishers are far more concerned with making sure their readers are rich. The New York Times, for example, boasts to advertisers its readership “is almost three times as likely as the average U.S. adult to have a college or post-graduate degree, more than twice as likely to be professional/managerial and almost three times as likely to have a household income exceeding [US]$100,000.” Those robust demographics are nurtured by a series of discriminating editorial choices — special issues devoted to food, money, design, “The Sophisticated Traveller … Lives Well Lived,” and so on.

The skew is even more pronounced outside New York, where most daily newspapers are local monopolies that don’t share the Times’ journalistic aspirations. Sunday magazines, especially, are open-handed insults to the have-nots, with their landscape architecture spreads and write-ups of US$200 brunches. Internet sections come and go based on the tech-sector marketing climate of the moment (as opposed to the amount of online activity, which continues to boom). Murder victims in the ghetto are lucky to merit single paragraphs on B5, while affluent college kids struck by stray bullets are memorialized above the fold. . . .

“Daily newspapers have effectively dropped the bottom quintile or perhaps a third of the population,” wrote communications professor Robert McChesney of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, in a chapter of the 2002 book Into the Buzzsaw.

It’s worse than the Digital Divide — it’s the Newsprint Divide!