Sick days and younger readers

Here is an interesting and conventionally well-executed business story on corporate sick time policies.

This is a "business" story, designed for that section of most newspapers that also includes the daily stock market reports.

The "business" section is, essentially, the "capital" section for most papers. Capital is quite important — a vital component of "business." But it is not the only component nor, by far, the most populous. Yet newspapers offer no corresponding section providing regular coverage of labor.

And this is what is both typical and deeply strange about Michael J. Diamond's article on sick time policies. In Asbury Park, N.J., where this story was first published, there are far more employees than there are employers. (And since every employer is also an employee, this seems to hold true universally.) Yet this article — like the majority of the content in newspapers' business sections — is written almost exclusively for and from the perspective of employers.

This is odd. Why do newspapers insist on avoiding the concerns of the vast majority of their readers in order to focus on an audience that makes up only a fraction of their readership?

Imagine if this practice were followed in, say, the sports section.

The normal policy for sports sections is to focus on the concerns of sports fans. The fans, the people, are the intended audience and readership. This makes sense when you consider the demographics of the world of sports. Consider a typical baseball game: Only 20-30 players actually participate in the game, with a few dozen others in uniform as coaches and reserves. If you add to this all of the other sports professionals — management, broadcasters, trainers, etc. — you'll still end up with only a few hundred, at most, directly involved in the business of the game. In the stands, however, are thousands of fans (even in Montreal or Tampa Bay), with thousands more watching or listening from home.

It makes sense for the sports section of the newspaper to be written for this audience of thousands and not targeted to the narrow concerns of the few hundred athletes and professionals actively involved in the game itself.

This analogy breaks down, however, since employees are more than simply spectators on the sidelines of the world of business. They are active participants. They get up and go to work. They pay bills. To paraphrase Lloyd Dobler: they sell things, buy things and process things; they sell things bought and processed; they buy things sold and processed; they process things sold and bought.

Yet their world — the world of work, of 9-to-5, of the workplace, of the paycheck that must somehow last to the end of the month — is at best tangentially covered by most newspapers' business sections and business reporting.

"The priority of labor over capital" (to borrow a phrase from Abe Lincoln and Catholic social teaching) would make good business sense for any newspaper trying to reach and serve the largest possible readership.

Sick time policies are an important and interesting topic for nearly every employee. They'll be drawn to read an article with a headline like "Sick time often a balancing act."

But when they read it, they will find it's not written with them in mind. By reading between the lines, they will glean some useful information, but they'll finish this article with the enduring sense that it was written for someone else. Read enough articles that make you feel that way and eventually you'll get the message and stop reading the newspaper altogether.

This may, in fact, be exactly what has happened for many of those "younger readers" that newspapers are now so desperate to reach. How many 18-to-34-year-olds are employers? How many are "capital"? How many would find articles like Diamond's as more than vaguely peripheral to their concerns?

The new tabloids aimed at younger readers have an opportunity to address this glaring gap in conventional business journalism.

By covering the world of business for an audience of employees (i.e. workers, most people), they might actually succeed in attracting younger readers. If they do this right, they'll end up attracting a big chunk of "older" readers as well.