Open thread for night owls: Wall Street Journal covers caviar better than worker-owned businesses

Long ago, at nearly every major city newspaper, a beat assigned to at least one staff reporter was labor. This was especially so in the days when cities often had two or more competing newspapers. The subject was covered extensively, just as newspapers now cover business. The number of full-time labor reporters to be found in American papers today can be counted on one hand. Daily Kos does more labor coverage, and labor union coverage, than 99.9 percent of the 1,382 daily newspapers in the United States.

It's no surprise then that those newspapers miss a few important stories. Like, for instance, the one highlighted in the on-line Yes! magazine in a recent article by Gar Alperovitz and Keane Bhatt: Cooperative businesses are proliferating quickly, but you wouldn't know it from reading the Wall Street Journal:

Social pain, anger at ecological degradation and the inability of traditional politics to address deep economic failings has fueled an extraordinary amount of practical on-the-ground institutional experimentation and innovation by activists, economists and socially minded business leaders in communities around the country. A vast democratized "new economy" is slowly emerging throughout the United States. The general public, however, knows almost nothing about it because the American press simply does not cover the developing institutions and strategies. For instance, a sample assessment of coverage between January and November of 2012 by the most widely circulated newspaper in the United States, the Wall Street Journal, found ten times more references to caviar than to employee-owned firms, a growing sector of the economy that involves more than $800 billion in assets and 10 million employee-owners'around three million more individuals than are members of unions in the private sector. Worker ownership'the most common form of which involves ESOPs, or Employee Stock Ownership Plans'was mentioned in a mere five articles. By contrast, over 60 articles referred to equestrian activities like horse racing, and golf clubs appeared in 132 pieces over the same period. Although 2012 was designated by the United Nations as the International Year of the Cooperative'an institution that now has more than one billion members worldwide'the Journal's coverage was similarly thin.

There's more from Alperovitz and Bhatt on this subject at the link.

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