I don't know if these qualify but google search for "coal miners coding" turns up a ton of pieces about some coal miners shifting work to coding. Presumably these people think such profiles are kind of condescending as the implied story is "your blue collar career is on the outs and your labor has no value."
The nature of journalism is that outlets report on things that are happening in the world. If these stories were just long opinion pieces about why former coal miners should code, that would be one thing and the criticism would be valid. But each of these pieces linked is literally a reported out piece about actual people and groups teaching people to code.
You could probably go back and forth on whether the idea condescends to blue-collar workers. But the fact is, there wouldn't be these stories if the trend didn't exist and there wasn't a legitimate effort to make it happen before a reporter gave someone a call.
There's nothing implied at all. They are blue collar workers. Their career is on the decline because the mines are closing and there aren't enough new ones opening up to simply transfer the existing labour force to the new mines. So you retrain these people for work that is available.
Can you find any of these articles published on BuzzFeed? The problem with this criticism is that it claims that all journalists have the same opinion on blue-collar-retraining issue.
