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To what extent is local journalism impacted by the deep poverty of an area and its population? To answer this question, the article focuses on the Roubaix offices of La Voix du Nord and Nord-Eclair daily newspapers. Based on content analysis and interviews with journalists, this article aims to grasp the practical and normative constraints that shape the work of editors embedded in a community marked by severe socio-economic inequality. Social heterogeneity makes the following questions especially salient: About whom, for whom, and from which perspective should one write? Raising issues related to both symbolic and political representation, the journalists’ commitment leads them to distinguish between episodic news stories on poor people and the (less frequent) thematic framing of poverty as a public problem. These observations show that, to a certain extent, the city “makes” its newspaper, due to the unequal abilities of social groups to capture the attention of journalists and the specific issues they aim to put on the agenda.