Experts Say
A story in Wednesday's Chicago Tribune appears to rip its lead right from a summary of the Pew Research Center study on which it's based. Or is it just sloppy?
Trib's lead:
Cheating on your income taxes is almost as bad as cheating on your mate, and smoking pot isn't as bad as drinking to excess.
Pew's lead:
Cheating on your taxes is almost as bad as cheating on your spouse.
Drinking excessively is worse than smoking marijuana.
The writer could have easily avoided this by leading with the finding he deems most interesting: That college graduates are more likely than less-educated people to find certain behaviors morally acceptable. Such behaviors include having an abortion, getting drunk, homosexual behavior, gambling, fornicating, smoking pot and lying to spare someone's feelings.
But he can't lead with that because he doesn't try to explain it in the rest of the story.
I don't want to blame this on the individual reporter, Charles Madigan, especially as he is busy as sin, running the Trib's 24-hour online news desk, writing a column and covering other stories. I think the problem here is that newspapers treat these studies as forgettable hard news. To cover these studies in any useful way, editors should change their place in the news cycle.
If you want a timely news item, run a brief and an online link to the study page, which explains it just as well as the story, and tease to a Sunday-paper, magazine-style feature that questions and explores the study. Or even a brief with an infograph like the one that ran with this story. Why run a bulky, perfunctory rewrite? Recognize the source for its real value--a starting point for reporting that reveals something the source itself doesn't. That eventually serves the reader much better than feeding the information to the infernal news beast.
Good model for immediate reporting on a study: Gallup Poll Podcasts. Very short, to the point, and sometimes witty.
Trib's lead:
Cheating on your income taxes is almost as bad as cheating on your mate, and smoking pot isn't as bad as drinking to excess.
Pew's lead:
Cheating on your taxes is almost as bad as cheating on your spouse.
Drinking excessively is worse than smoking marijuana.
The writer could have easily avoided this by leading with the finding he deems most interesting: That college graduates are more likely than less-educated people to find certain behaviors morally acceptable. Such behaviors include having an abortion, getting drunk, homosexual behavior, gambling, fornicating, smoking pot and lying to spare someone's feelings.
But he can't lead with that because he doesn't try to explain it in the rest of the story.
I don't want to blame this on the individual reporter, Charles Madigan, especially as he is busy as sin, running the Trib's 24-hour online news desk, writing a column and covering other stories. I think the problem here is that newspapers treat these studies as forgettable hard news. To cover these studies in any useful way, editors should change their place in the news cycle.
If you want a timely news item, run a brief and an online link to the study page, which explains it just as well as the story, and tease to a Sunday-paper, magazine-style feature that questions and explores the study. Or even a brief with an infograph like the one that ran with this story. Why run a bulky, perfunctory rewrite? Recognize the source for its real value--a starting point for reporting that reveals something the source itself doesn't. That eventually serves the reader much better than feeding the information to the infernal news beast.
Good model for immediate reporting on a study: Gallup Poll Podcasts. Very short, to the point, and sometimes witty.
posted by Scott at 6:25 PM
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