I feel honored to note that two of Malcolm Gladwell’s big anecdotes in his new book were covered first in my newspaper column!
— Gladwell: “For American students from wealthy homes, summer vacation isn’t a problem; but, citing the research of a Johns Hopkins sociologist, Gladwell shows that it’s a profound handicap for students from poor homes, who actually outlearn their rich counterparts during the school year but then fall behind them when school lets out. ‘For its poorest students, America doesn’t have a school problem,’ Gladwell concludes. ‘It has a summer-vacation problem.’”
— Benton, July 2003: “Two years ago, researchers at Johns Hopkins University published a fascinating study…They found that schools were actually doing a pretty good job of helping poor kids keep up. From September to May, poor first-graders in the study learned enough to boost their scores 106 points. The scores of middle-class and wealthy kids went up 106 points, too — dead even. But when they tested the same kids again at the end of summer vacation, the better-off kids had gained another 24 points while away from school. Poor kids had dropped 9 points. The researchers kept following the kids and found the same gap yawning open every summer. Over five summers, the well-off kids gained a total of 72 points while on break. The poor kids lost a total of 7 points - which means they entered sixth grade almost a year behind, purely because of what happened during the summer. ‘Summer’s a big reason for the existence of that gap,’ Mr. Fairchild said.”
— Gladwell: “Because Canada’s eligibility cutoff for junior hockey is January 1, Gladwell writes, ‘a boy who turns 10 on January 2, then, could be playing alongside someone who doesn’t turn 10 until the end of the year.’ You can guess at that age, when the differences in physical maturity are so great, which one of those kids is going to make the league all-star team. Once on that all-star team, the January 2 kid starts practicing more, getting better coaching, and playing against tougher competition—so much so that by the time he’s, say, 14, he’s not just older than the kid with the December 30 birthday, he’s better.”
— Benton, August 2007 (my last column!): “For instance, 10 years ago, the international body that governs soccer decided to change the way it breaks children into age groups for select team competitions. Instead of letting kids move from age group to age group as their birthdays passed, it decided to set a uniform date that would be the cutoff point for everyone. That date was Jan. 1. From that point on, kids with birthdays early in the year would always be the oldest, and kids born in November and December would always be the youngest. As a result, the U.S. national soccer team for boys 15 and younger skews the way you’d imagine. The team has 24 members, and 17 of them have birthdays in January, February or March. Again, does just a few months of age difference mean that much in the physical abilities of a teenager? Maybe. But the bigger differences are when these kids are younger — when they’re playing their first soccer as 5- and 6-year-olds. Older kids, whose physical skills have developed a bit more, get singled out for the most praise. They get access to the best coaching. Their parents become convinced they have the most innate talent.”
And then we both draw analogies from our sport-of-choice to the public schools.
I should go on parallel-universe book tour.
12 November 2008 |
1 comment
Also, happy birthday to me. Thirty-three.
06 November 2008 |
3 comments
So how’d I do? Eh, so-so.
— “Obama wins by a surprising eight points, 53-45, with a hair under two points for the Barr/Nader crowd.” Real numbers: 52.4 for Obama, 46.3 for McCain, 1.3 for everyone else. (Although there are still votes missing, and Nate Silver seems to think Obama’s lead will grow another few fractions of a point as the remaining votes are counted.)
— “Battlegrounds: Obama wins: Ohio, Pennsylvania, Florida, Michigan, New Hampshire, Iowa, Georgia, Virginia, North Carolina, Nevada, Colorado, New Mexico, North Dakota (!), Montana (!). McCain wins: Missouri, Indiana.” I was right on OH, PA, FL, MI, NH, IA, VA, NC, NV, CO, NM, and MO. Erroneously gave Obama GA, ND, and MT; erroneously gave McCain IN. Underestimated the value of Obama’s Chicago supporters doing GOTV across the border; overestimated the black vote in Georgia, the Ron Paul vote in Montana, and my own sense in North Dakota.
— “Total EVs: Obama 374, McCain 164.” Reality: 349-162 so far; assuming results stay the same in NC and MO (and Obama gets the 1 EV in Omaha), the final result will be 365-175.
— “Senate: Dems take Virginia, New Mexico, Colorado, Alaska, New Hampshire, Oregon, North Carolina, Minnesota. Georgia goes to a December runoff for the 60th seat.” I was right on VA, NM, CO, NH, OR, NC, and GA. The other two (AK, MN) are all technically still uncalled, but it’s looks like I’ll be wrong on AK, and who knows on MN. (I didn’t mention the other close Senate races I expected to remain status quo, MS, LA, and KY. I got those right.)
— “House: Dems add 29 seats.” Reality: It’s currently +19, but there are eight races still undecided, so it’ll probably be something like 4-6 off.
So a decent showing, but I expected a bit better.
One last note. The second pane of this NYT graphic is one of the most shameful images I’ve seen in a long time. It’s a map of the counties where McCain in ‘08 outperformed Bush in ‘04. There aren’t many — after all, the entire country moved about around eight points in the Democrats’ direction, and it was remarkably consistent across states. (See graph #5.)
The counties that went toward McCain — despite the last four years — are overwhelmingly in the south. More particularly, they’re in the parts of the south with a history of white racism and not enough blacks to overcome their racism through vastly increased turnout. Lots of Arkansas, Tennessee, and — sadly — my home state of Louisiana. And don’t blame the shift all on Katrina — my home parish, Acadia Parish, went McCain 72-26 after going Bush 63-35 in ‘04 and 59-38 in ‘00, and Katrina and Rita didn’t do anything to us. I talked to enough friends back home and got enough forwarded nonsense anti-Obama emails to know how much of that vote was motivated by pure hatred of black people. I love my home state, but it’s a goddamn shame.
05 November 2008 |
1 comment
Just to get on the record:
Obama wins by a surprising eight points, 53-45, with a hair under two points for the Barr/Nader crowd.
Battlegrounds: Obama wins: Ohio, Pennsylvania, Florida, Michigan, New Hampshire, Iowa, Georgia, Virginia, North Carolina, Nevada, Colorado, New Mexico, North Dakota (!), Montana (!). McCain wins: Missouri, Indiana.
Total EVs: Obama 374, McCain 164.
Senate: Dems take Virginia, New Mexico, Colorado, Alaska, New Hampshire, Oregon, North Carolina, Minnesota. Georgia goes to a December runoff for the 60th seat.
House: Dems add 29 seats.
03 November 2008 |
1 comment
The Medill grad students at the Crunchberry Project have a good post examining the various ways of getting comments from readers. Interestingly (and smartly), they define “comments” broadly to include any sort of feedback from the audience — including polls, star ratings, Slashdot-style up/down voting, Salon’s letters to the editor, and even Mad Libs-style fill-in-the-blanks.
I like the way they’re thinking, and I think providing structure to the commenting process is worth exploring, for two reasons.
First, not to get all McLuhanish, but I suspect the tone and quality of comments would be affected — maybe even for the better. A lot of commenter behavior is based on social modeling; think of it as the Broken Windows thesis applied to web sites. If a site has lots of high-quality comments and a community of users who really care about the place, it’s a lot less likely that some bozo will come along and dump nonsense all over the place. Conversely, if a site is known far and wide for the junk in its comments, it’s very hard to raise the standard of conversation.
The form of the commenting system is important in setting those guidelines. For instance, Salon’s system requires user accounts and explicitly rewards good comments with prominent display. It also uses a metaphor (“letters to the editor”) that evokes a time when time lapsed between when a thought crossed your mind and when it appeared before a reading audience. It also, on every comment, provides a link to all of that user’s other comments — making it clear that he will be connected to his dumb tossed-off slander for ever and ever. All of these structural systems conspire to create relatively high-quality comments.
Another example: When you leave a comment on the blogging platform Vox, you’re given the opportunity to check a box marked “[this is good].” (Note the Mad Men reference in that last link.) It’s a very small detail (and an obscure reference to a old-school web site), but I’d wager the availability of a small and easy way to express a positive emotion makes the comment quality a little bit better. There’s no blanket answer on how to make comments better, but I’d sure like to see more experimentation around structured response in comment systems.
And the second reason? Data. Anytime you provide structure to comments, you generate data that can be used in interesting ways. Think of it as a corollary to Holovaty’s Law — it then becomes trivial to detect trends in your commenters that might be of interest to your audience or your writers, if packaged correctly.
23 October 2008 |
1 comment
Those of you who, like me, are borderline obsessed with AMC’s Mad Men will enjoy this lengthy interview with the show’s creator, Matthew Weiner. But of note to folks in the content business is this exchange:
Q. Now that we’re in season two, is it difficult to deliver more of those interesting factoids during each commercial break?
A. I have nothing to do with those. As the sponsors (come in), whatever sponsors they get, it’s their problem. I love them. They are Tivo stoppers. It was a really brilliant idea; I had nothing to do with them. If it was up to me I would do things the way they did in 1960. I would have a single sponsor doing the whole show and tie them to the show. But because this is the way it’s done and they’re selling minutes, I think it’s the most palatable and innovative thing I’ve seen, especially considering what’s happened with TV advertising. I’ve been very impressed by it. I think it looks like something Don Draper would have thought of.
They’re talking about what AMC calls, gratingly enough, Mad-vertising. At the start of each commercial break, instead of going straight to an ad, there’s a five-second title card displaying some fact about the advertiser — typically, a fact about its past or present advertising campaigns. Sample title cards: “Prescription drugs could not be advertised on television in the United States until 1997,” just before a drug ad. Or “Heineken was the first imported beer in America after the repeal of Prohibition in 1933,” just before (you guessed it) a Heineken ad.
It grabs you for an instant, just at the moment when you’re doing to get a drink or head to the bathroom. And it makes you pay at least a little attention to the ad. As an AMC exec told Variety, “That’s AMC’s ‘dirty little secret’…You’re not blowing through the commercial. You’re thinking, ‘What’s going on here?’ “
Commenter Daniel put it well over at this blog post:
They do this neat, ‘tivo-proof” type of commercial billboard before most commercials…I bite. Originally, I paused because I think that maybe the show is coming back — a la traditional billboard/bumper. Now I am conditioned to stop, because I am getting some value in exchange — I get ad history/trivia, facts, music/artists in spots, etc…All good. I watch more, stay through commercial breaks, AND I have a high recall of the ads.
With newspapers having lost their traditional near-monopoly over certain kinds of advertising, media that can effectively draw and retain audience attention will be rewarded over the easy-to-ignore. The Mad Men method — give something of value in coordination with the ad — seems like a promising idea for TV. What can print or web sites do to innovate along similar lines?
23 October 2008 |
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That web of circles and lines is BBC blogger Steve Bowbrick’s conception of what’s standing in the way of a more “open” BBC. There’s a discussion going on in the comments of Steve’s post, but a better one on the image’s Flickr page. Any of these recognizable from a news organization dear to your heart?
20 October 2008 |
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Journalism Enterprise briefly tells the story of alfa.lt, the third-ranked Lithuanian news site. I don’t know how much the Lithuanian and American Internet experiences overlap, but it is interesting that alfa.lt attributes its growth to targeted online marketing — first via search engines, then (after search got too expensive) via social networks. They knew the demographics they were seeking, and cheap-but-targeted ads online were the way to do it.
20 October 2008 |
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Siobhain Butterworth, The Guardian’s ombudsman, writes about changing the content of past newspaper stories to please readers. When a news story’s life-after-publication was limited to dusty library stacks, an embarrassing anecdote could go safely unnoticed. But when it falls within the searching power of Google, it takes on a life of its own.
Butterworth writes about three people who had revealed their long-ago criminal acts for the newspaper, either in a blog post written for the paper or in the course of an interview with a reporter. All three had second thoughts after publication. The Guardian agreed, in each case, to change the person’s name to a pseudonym:
The established view is that a newspaper’s online archive is a historical record and that there is therefore a strong public interest in maintaining its wholeness, unless deletions or amendments are strictly necessary…It’s impossible to come up with rigid criteria, and decisions made on a case-by-case basis produce inconsistencies. Saying yes to all requests for the removal of material that causes the people concerned distress or hinders their employment prospects would be easier, but it’s a solution that, over time, will leave a patchy and unreliable record of what was published…A less extreme solution, which was adopted in the three cases mentioned earlier, is to replace a real name with a pseudonym and add a footnote explaining that the change has been made. It’s not ideal, but it’s preferable to re-writing history completely by deleting an article, blog post or letter and pretending that it didn’t exist.
I’ve had people email me, years after being mentioned on my personal blog, and asked to be anonymized or removed from the archives. In a couple of cases, I’ve done it. But a personal blog is not the same, of course, as The Guardian’s archives. Do you think The Guardian made the right call?
20 October 2008 |
1 comment
Global News Enterprises, the new Boston international news startup, has announced its new branding (as Global Post) and its launch date, January 12. They’ve also put together a six-minute intro video with lots of thunderous foreign-correspondent-on-the-march music. I like the typeface!
(N.B.: The Nieman Foundation has conflict-of-interest out the wazoo when it comes to Global. Charlie Sennott, the top editor, is an ex-Nieman Fellow and a friend of the foundation’s; our curator and my boss, Bob Giles, is on Global’s advisory board. And Andy Meldrum — seen in that video being manhandled by the Zimbabwean authorities — is another former fellow and a good friend. They’re an interesting enough company, so we can’t just ignore them, and we’ll be as evenhanded as we can. But nota bene nonetheless.)
20 October 2008 |
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I’m glad that, whatever else one thinks of Tina Brown or her Daily Beast, she’s created a boomlet of sales for Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop, the greatest of all journalism novels.
20 October 2008 |
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If the numbers presented here and here are true — and the rates web sites get for online advertising have really dropped 46 percent since the final quarter of 2007 — my optimism for future business models of journalism just took a dive.
The fundamental monkey wrench the Internet threw at newspapers was the loss of their functional monopolies over local advertising. The Internet is the opposite of a monopoly; the number of potential placements for advertising approach infinity. Basic economics tell you that increasing that supply of potential placements should drive down the price any of them can get. That’s why I’m skeptical, in the long term, of any future news business model based primarily on advertising revenue — there’ll always be more content being created to advertise against, and a single news organization will never be able to keep up.
But if these numbers are right, maybe I’m wrong in seeing that as a long-term problem.
Then again, there’s every possibility these numbers are screwy. They separate out rates for news sites (page 17 of this PDF) and claim CPMs shot up from 36 cents in Q1 to 56 cents in Q2 and back down to 36 cents in Q3. (This, while overall online advertising went from 37 to 34 to 27 over the same span.)
That sort of crazy Q2 bump makes me think they’re dealing with too small a universe of data. (And it’s worth noting that these CPMs are for ad-network-sold display advertising only. Sites make significantly more money off the ads they sell outside ad networks.)
17 October 2008 |
1 comment
From Zach Seward: A new innovation for blogs sounds a lot like an old model for newspapers: Gawker unveiled a voice mailbox today for sources who don’t want to leave a digital trace of their gossip, leaked memos, and other tips. Publisher Nick Denton explained that “everybody’s more paranoid than ever that the boss’ IT agents are snooping.” Now, instead of emailing, they can call 646-214-8138. (That’s a third-tier New York City area code, which Gawker would be sure to mock if any other media company were using it.) We gave the number a ring this afternoon, and here’s the surprisingly corporate-sounding voice on the other end of the line.
Denton said callers should indicate if they don’t want the audio of their call published on the site. Otherwise, they could end up like some readers of the San Francisco Chronicle, which last year published voicemail messages left by irate or otherwise amusing callers. Does your news organization have a way for tips to be left by phone, anonymously or no?
17 October 2008 |
No comments
A typically smart piece from Mindy McAdams on the emotional relationship between reporters and their readers, and on the demise of “story.”
On the first point, I think she gets at something important about why so many reporters react in horror at the comments left on their stories. Reporters feel powerless when their work is attacked in the comments, fairly or unfairly, because they’re taught not to respond. How many times have you seen a reporter actually engaging with readers in the comments on their story?
Reporters are given one very powerful pulpit from which to speak — their byline — and are then taught they can’t engage in human conversation about their work in any other forum. In some ways, I think the hesitance to engage is an extension of the rules that limit political activity for reporters and editors. They both come from the same ethos: You get one outlet for your voice (your story), and anything other mode of expression is asking for trouble.
On the second point, I don’t share with Mindy’s worry that moving away from the story-centric model of journalism will kill storytelling:
I am loath to say the story is dead, because humans have been telling stories to one another as a way to make sense of the world since long before we planted seeds in the soil and began to build houses. Stories give us a way to understand different people and places and to calm our fears about them. Stories help us learn how to do new things. Stories enable us to dream, inspire us to reach beyond what we can grasp. Without stories, we would be poorer.
I don’t think it’s “the story” that is primed for the guillotine. It’s “the newspaper story.” Or “the TV news story,” or what have you. It’s the set of boxes our ancestors (James Fenton’s “horrible old men”) created for us as the sole vessels of our journalism. When those give way to better models — or, more accurately, to a variety of models, old and new — they’ll still have narrative arcs and fulfill the primal storytelling urge.
17 October 2008 |
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