Media jobs in the old days had been spread nationwide and linked to the political cultures of their diverse readerships. “The Sioux Falls Argus Leader is stuck in South Dakota just as the owners of hydroelectric plants in the Rockies are stuck where they are,” Shafer and Doherty pointed out. But three quarters (73 percent) of twenty-first-century internet media jobs were either in the northeast corridor, on the West Coast, or in Chicago. Those places were rich and overwhelmingly Democratic: 90 percent of people working in the reconfigured news industry lived in a county that Democrats would
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