Abandoning the News

by Merrill Brown

What's the future of the news business? This report
to Carnegie Corporation of New York offers some provocative ideas.

http://www.carnegie.org/reporter/10/news/index.html

Today's New York Times Science Section
carries a column by Richard Friendman, M.D. about the challenge of
explaining statistical concepts and probability to anyone.  (Even
journalists?)  His conclusion: “The
truth is that random events can make or break us.  It is more
comforting to believe in the power of hard work and merit than to think
that probability reigns not only in the casino but in daily life.”

So there.



See: “Mix Math and Medicine and Create Confusion.”

A different viewpoint about granting reporters too many privileges.

Shield laws can cover too much

Dan Gillmor picks up a story from California's Contra Costa Times about
a Republican operative who has been sending phony letters-to-the-editor
bashing Demos, more than 200 letters for the past 10 years.



 

According to the CC Times story….



“”Bogus
letters have a tremendous effect on the readers,” Times Editorial Page
editor Dan Hatfield said. “People need to be able to know that the
letters to the editor are real people, writing about real issues. They
need to be able to believe what they read in the newspaper. The
discovery of false letters makes the reader wonder about the veracity
of the opinions on our pages….

“Hatfield said the paper has tightened its policy, but there is no way to screen writers intent on breaking the rules….



“The Times, [San Francisco] Chronicle and [Tri-Valley] Herald have similar
letter to the editor verification policies. A writer must provide his
or her resident city and phone number. A newspaper employee then calls
the writer to verify that they sent it in.



“Unfortunately,
there is not a fail-safe way that I have found. No matter how elaborate
the system one designs, there is always some knucklehead out there who
wants to ruin it for everyone by proving that he or she can beat it.”



Maybe not a “fail-safe” way to stop this Astro-turfing, but stronger controls would be possible if an organization like the American Press Institute or Newspaper Association of American
would create an online data base that all newspapers could have access
to.  The calling-to-check approach is pretty standard in the
business.  Each letters editor could enter the pertinent info on
the writers they decide to publish into the data base.  It
wouldn't take much programming to do some automated data mining on
phone numbers and/or cities or addresses or spelling patterns of names
for flags to be raised.  Sure, someone could always have a couple
phone numbers and even a couple mailing addresses.  But 200? 

As to text analysis that could be applied to the language of the
letters-to-the-editors, see the IAJ link lower right to Don Foster's
book, Author Unknown.

Hardly
a week seems to go by but one of those folks who calls himself/herself a
journalist is busted for either “creative harvesting”, i.e.
plagiarism, or engaging of the writing of fiction under the guise of
journalism.  The latest is a case involving Technology Review. 
According to Boston.com and AP:

That said, check out J's
Scratchpad and the entries for “Journalism
Errors.”  Jessica Baumgart, Information Resources Specialist in
Harvard University's Office of News and Public Affairs, is taking the time to
track these sorry events.

Gary Price's Resource Shelf
indirectly pointed us to a new resource that can provide journalists
with a quick and not-so-dirty GIS tool for their community or any other
in the U.S.  GeoLib is the Public
Library Geographic Database (PLGDB) Mapping site.  But its mapping
engine delivers far more than just push-pining public libraries. 
The GIS server can  display a variety of physical, demographic and
political boundaries and data that can be turned on and off in
traditional GIS layers.  The resulting maps could be easily copied
with a tool like Snag-It and dropped into a document or web page.

“Florida State University's GeoLib Program ( www.geolib.org )
is developing the National Public Library Geographic Database. The
database includes the locations of 16,000 public libraries, data sets
from the US Census, and library use statistics from the National Center
for Educational Statistics. The goal of this database is to provide
consolidated information on public libraries nationwide, easily
accessible over the Internet. The project is sponsored by the Institute
of Museum and Library Services ( www.imls.gov )

A
key ingredient to the long term success of the PLGDB is the ongoing
incorporation of other relevant data. We need your feedback as to what
data you would like to have in the future. We hope the database will
offer public librarians access to data that can shape local, regional
and national library policies. For more information about GeoLib and
its programs and to find out about the latest status and data releases
of the National Public Library Geographic Database check back on this
website regularly.”

A short, but touching, piece turned up on Alternet.org
today, reminding us that no matter what government officials may say,
at some point they are going to have to produce some numbers and
measure change in those numbers.  See:



“Why Numbers Matter

By Marla Ruzicka, AlterNet

War on Iraq:
Just before her death, Marla Ruzicka wrote about the importance of
recording and publicly releasing Iraqi civilian casualty numbers.”

And this is the story from The Independent in the UK about Ms. Ruzicka and the general work related to tallying the numbers.  See:

Aid worker uncovered America's secret tally of Iraqi civilian deaths
By Andrew Buncombe in Washington

Finally, a news/obit on Ms. Ruzicka from the San Francisco Chronicle.

Here's a link to an education article with a suggestion to revamp the University of California admission's system.  Our stake in public education

The good folks from TRAC just
keep on keepin' on.  Once again David Burnham and Susan B. Long
are out in front on the effort to demand that the people's data be made
available to the people.  So comes this from TRAC today:



“The
IRS is illegally withholding information about its operations, claiming
that the public release of some of it would compromise homeland
security. Details of the agency's actions are laid out in the lawsuit
against the IRS filed on April 14 under the Freedom of Information Act.
The lawsuit, brought for TRAC's co-directors David Burnham and Susan B.
Long by Scott Nelson of the Public Citizen Litigation Group, is part of
an ongoing effort to provide the American people with information they
need to judge how the IRS is carrying out its important
responsibilities. The agency's current policy of refusing to make
public routine statistical information and how it is collected reverses
a thirty-year period of relative openness. To see a press release about
the filing, the actual complaint and a short discussion of the dangers
posed by IRS secrecy, go to”:

    http://trac.syr.edu/foia  

A while ago we participated in an on-line project to test the small world hypothesis — the idea that people are connected by only six degrees of separation.



Some of the results from that project have been published in the journal Science.  You can download a copy of the results here, http://smallworld.columbia.edu/results.html and also examine the methodology.



This study has some interesting implications, not just about “social connectedness” but how one can use the internet and, Gasp!, “self-selecting respondents” to do what seems to be valid social science research, at least of a specific sort.