None of your business (cont'd.)

Imagine a newspaper with no "Business" section. Where the Business section is now, there is, instead, a "Work" section.

It would make sense for the paper from a, you know, business standpoint. Higher circulation means more revenue for the paper, so it makes sense to focus on the needs, concerns and interests the largest number of potential readers. The current model of a Business section is designed for only the tiniest slice of potential readers — those who think of themselves primarily as investors. Why not aim, instead, for the vastly larger, overwhelming majority of potential readers, those who think of themselves primarily as people who work for a living?

The arithmetic here is so elementary that, when one stops to think about it, it's bewildering that newspapers haven't been doing this for decades.

Work, after all, is where most of a newspaper's readers spend most of their waking hours. People get up in the morning, pour the coffee, and head to work. This is what we call it. This is how we think of it. Do you have off tomorrow? No, I have to work. Stay for one more? No, I've got to be at work early.

Nobody ever says they have to be at business early.

Think how differently that section of the paper would have evolved if it had been the Work section instead of the Business section. It wouldn't have two pages of dense, inscrutable columns of stock prices tailored to people who think of themselves as "investors." (They're not, of course — if you're checking the stock price every day, you're not so much investing in the company as betting on it.) Instead there might be columns listing the hourly wages for various employers and industries and their competing benefit plans.

If that last suggestion strikes you as shocking because information about wages and benefits is a private matter, that's because you've been reading newspapers with Business sections and not Work sections all these years and you've learned to think about these things from that perspective. If you'd been reading a newspaper with a Work section, instead, then you'd have spent all those years developing a better BS detector for that kind of thing. Thus if someone suggested that wages and benefits ought to be intensely private and secretive, you'd have learned to ask what it was they were trying to hide and why they're insisting on a labor market in which workers operate with imperfect and incomplete information.

The larger point there being that if we, the readers, had been reading a different kind of newspaper, we might be different too. We might have learned to ask different questions and therefore we might have learned to insist on different answers.

Take any Business story from the past year and think how it might have been reported on differently if it had appeared instead in the Work section. Housing bubble, time-bomb mortgage lending, bubble-backed securities, bailouts, Too Big To Fail, tax-funded bonuses, etc. They would all have been reported on very differently if the reporters had been operating in a framework of the needs, concerns and interests of workers rather than of investors.

Now think of how that kind of different reporting would inform and empower readers. And about how readers so informed and empowered might have different expectations and standards of accountability for elected and corporate leaders.

If we had a different kind of "business" press, not only would all these stories have been reported differently, but it's possible some of them might not have happened at all.