In the days after Hurricane Katrina swept through the gulf coast and levees failed to keep the storm surge from flooding New Orleans, some members of the media said they were shocked by the poverty they found in the city. They vowed not to let poverty coverage fade from view. But some journalists say that’s exactly what happened. And today, a panel of news editors, opinion writers and reporters put poverty coverage, itself, under the microscope.

The panel, sponsored by the Welfare Reform Network, scrutinized the problems with current coverage including reader apathy and limited access to impoverished people and made suggestions on ways to bring more attention to issues surrounding poverty.

Many newspapers do not even have poverty beat reporters.

All too frequently, stock market or the housing market will headline a page and poverty will be left off it, Neil deMause, opinion writer for Metro New York, a free paper distributed on street corners and at subway entrances, said.

“Economic coverage is Wall Street coverage,” he said.

DeMause said that few media outlets dedicate themselves to long-term coverage of systemic poverty. Editors see the issue as a “downer” that does not interest the reading public, he said. “It’s not sexy.”

Instead of following economic issues of poor New Yorkers, panelists agreed that newspapers tend to cover poverty and poor New Yorkers around the holidays or will write an investigative series and then abandon the issue until the next season or policy change is in view.

The faults of coverage do not only lay with the reporters and editors, panelist Fred Scaglione, press editor of NY Non-Profit Press, told the audience of students, members of not-for-profit organizations and other journalists.

He urged them to write letters to editors, demanding that their papers publish more, and better, poverty stories.

“In my experience, editors respond to the demands of their readers,” he said.

But the best entry route into a story was contested.

Panelist Errol Louis, columnist for the NY Daily News, said that readers tend to lose sympathy for the subject of a profile or featured in an anecdote if that person made a bad decision that precipitated his or her current situation. He said that exposing flawed characters in print turn readers of his paper callous towards subjects. “Some readers think undeserving poor should not be helped,” he said.

But, he said, if a story is told that could happen to anybody—a car accident, for example, that renders a healthy adult disabled—and readers will be much more sympathetic, because they may be the next victim of an unfortunate turn of events.

Audience member Karen Wright addressed the panel and audience with a story of frustration. She was interviewed for an article about illegal boarding houses earlier this year. She felt that an element of the greater story was lost when her story was not told in full.

Wright also attacked panelist Jarret Murphy’s self-proclaimed love for using statistics in his stories. “I’m sick of being a statistic,” she said. Her words were met with applause.

Murphy, an editor of City Limits, noted that some organizations that work with poor New Yorkers direct staff not to speak to reporters. Instead, staff organize an interview with a client who has been spoon fed “talking points” to regurgitate to the reporter.

But audience member Barbara Delsman of The Hope Project, an organization that helps homeless and poor people find employment, explained that clients sometimes need to take caution when speaking with press. She does not coach clients, and was unable to say which organizations do.

“We don’t want them to fall victim,” she said. Instead, staff explains to clients that they should request anonymity if they are willing to divulge such information.

Delsman spoke about one example of a past client who told reporters personal information about his life regarding criminal activity and drug use, who later regretted his decision.

Louis noted that even though the number of New Yorkers living in public housing developments roughly equals the population of Atlanta, Ga., no public housing beat exists on his paper.

Jocelyn Wiener, a reporter with the Sacramento Bee and an ethics fellow with the Poynter Institute, who did not participate in the panel, said that many papers lack beats that cover poverty. One possible reason for this, she said, is that a poverty beat does not deliver a lot of breaking news.

At many papers, poverty, she said, is “not considered a fundamental element, like City Hall.”

When asked what issues of homelessness or poverty were being overlooked by the press, staff at Picture the Homeless, an organization of homeless people who work to prevent their compatriots from becoming mere statistics, answered, “how ’bout all of them?”