David Cay Johnston, the ex-New York Times business writer and populist author, indulges in a bit of Columbia Journalism Review Schadenfreude over the plight of the Pioneer Press newsroom, which is facing a $2.4 million cut.

Johnston views the whacking — which could amount to 30 of 138 jobs — as a teachable moment that "will encourage rigorous thinking in articles covering compensation."

Citing the potential loss of merit pay, Johnson writes:

Fellow journalists, welcome to the take-it-or-leave job market, the result of decades of economic policies reported on with little-to-no skepticism and mostly timid questioning, and one heretofore populated mostly by workers outside reporters’ social circles and class. Television news, especially cable television, has a major blame here for relying heavily on a narrow range of mostly white, male, affluent sources with economic ties to those who benefited from these economic policies, especially the talking heads supplied by the Big 12 ideological marketing organizations of the business-right, including the Heritage Foundation, the Competitive Enterprise Institute and their like. ...

Instead of looking for hopeful signs in each day’s stock market results, a modern version of reading tea leaves and animal entrails, perhaps some journalists will [ask] the fundamental questions about the labor market, not just for journalists but for all workers outside the executive suite. Who infected it? What has been the course of the disease? What remedies exist? What are the relative costs and benefits of applying different treatments?

And along with that it would be good to see a great deal of hard reporting on the consequences of letting an economic cancer metastasize.

This is hard-core grave-dancing, considering the whacking would amount to $8,000-$17,000 per PiPresser, depending on how it's distributed.

It's a little patronizing, too, since PiPressers I know have been long aware of the dynamic — the PiPress hasn't awarded merit pay in years, spokesman Dave Orrick told me, although some senior workers still get it. Even Johnston notes newspaper types aren't the biggest offender on economic matters.

Still, he's right about the end result, and some measure of comeuppance. Even a pinko like me finds it a whole lot easier these days to relate to beaten-down workers from beaten-down industries. While I don't blame plutocrats for the whole problem, this non-union slob felt a little extra outrage reporting about Par Ridder, or the news that the Strib's since-departed CFO walked away with 500K the year before that paper declared bankruptcy.

Even in unionized newsrooms, there's probably more Sotomayorian empathy for workers once regarded as "them," rather than "us." Of course, objectivity's dampening filter discourages stem-winders.

And let's show a bit of class consciousness and acknowledge that top editors — hired by union-loathing owners — weren't optimized to green light that big project on capitalism's grinding gears. Even though Minnesota remains one of the nation's more union-friendly states, neither paper has had a dedicated "labor" reporter in many moons.

That, of course, coincided with labor's wane, which began long before newsrooms themselves started waning. (The short-sighted grudges and long memories of union leaders — unbuffed by savvy corporate communicators — hurt labor's cause, but shouldn't stop a dogged reporter.) Amid the bubble years' economic froth, the labor beat morphed into the "workplace" beat, or became one of a dozen things the manufacturing reporter juggled.

That said, both papers have featured countless stories on unbalanced executive comp -- though to an average reader, such coverage was outweighed by the hagiography of chieftains who weren't exposed until their leverage was.

(We know a lot about TCF's anti-government generalissimo Bill Cooper, but who's the most influential labor leader in the state? I couldn't name him or her.)

And neither paper ignored stories about the labor market's health — think of the extensive reporting about Northwest Airlines mechanics, flight attendants and pilots, or prescient reporting about the mortgage crisis. Still, these were often covered as isolated events, implicitly justified by external conditions, despite the persistent decline of middle-class wages.

While many complain that journalists are too liberal to begin with, I'm hard pressed to think of anyone at either daily who would be allowed to wave the bloody shirt in the way Johnston recommends — even among those allowed to have an opinion.

Both editorial boards hew to the pro-business line. Among the few columnists left, maybe only Jon Tevlin or Ruben Rosario would take a whack at this, but they'd have to do it 600 words at a time and their attention is usually elsewhere. Neal St. Anthony has hit these themes, but he's a generalist and a gentleman; you'd need a give-'em-hell counterpart. Nick Coleman could use up his precious Sunday pile, but it might take him a year if he wasn't told to shut up first.

It would be refreshing if a reporter could be deployed to the "wages" beat, but this will probably have to be the new media's job. While rising unemployment has made the labor market more of a story, newsroom cuts like the PiPress' make such redeployment less likely than ever.