Inside the media’s Detroit gold rush

Thomas Morton at Vice magazine has done a great piece on the gold rush mentality emerging around coverage of troubles in Detroit, and he says this mentality is leading to some real lapses in basic journalistic ethics and judgment.

Morton reviews some of the out-of-context and overused images of blight that accompany much reporting on Detroit, and describes how other reporters — desperate to tell a happy story about the city — are overwhelming area urban gardens and art collectives with interview requests.

After suffering through the nation’s worst and most concentrated examples of racial violence, industrial collapse, serial arson, crack war, and municipal bankruptcy following years of municipal kleptocracy, Detroit is being descended on by a plague of reporters. If you live on a block near one of the city’s tens of thousands of abandoned buildings, you can’t toss a chunk of Fordite without hitting some schmuck with a camera worth more than your house.

Such coverage is only going to increase. Time magazine recently bought a house in Detroit and is moving several reporters from their various publications there with the intent of spending the next year taking a close look at the city’s problems.