Poverty should be in reporters’ crosshairs this coming year, as it will be a central issue in the presidential campaign, at least for certain candidates. John Edwards visited a street in South Carolina that still has outhouses. Barack Obama spoke in Clarendon County in the same state, where one of the first lawsuits that led to Brown v. Board of Education was filed. He said, “We’re going to have to reclaim in our own lives the belief that I am my brother’s keeper.” How can a reporter cover that most persistent of problems, poverty, today without making it boring and predictable, or guilt-tripping readers and turning them off? Do you focus on one injustice—say, a corrupt housing authority—or try to connect the dots and cover all of the reasons, both individual and systemic, that poverty is entrenched in certain places in America? Mary Ellen Schoonmaker, an editorial-board member at The Record in northern New Jersey, asked Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne Jr., a political writer who has his eye on poverty, to suggest some ways to return it to front-page status at our news organizations.

How can local reporters, who are not on the trail with John Edwards or anyone else, link what some of the candidates are saying about poverty to coverage in their own back yards?

People talk all the time about media bias. I actually think there’s a structural bias in the media against the poor. Newspapers are built to cover the wealthy and the famous much more than they are built to cover the working class or the poor. There are entire business sections devoted to what the people running big companies do. There are whole sections that focus on gossip about celebrities and rich sports figures. There are good reasons why...

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