Not the news
I was surprised to see a headline in the Business section of the Herald saying “2015 luckiest year for Lotto players” about lotto jackpots (story here)
After all, the way the lottery jackpots work, the amount paid out is a fixed fraction of the amount taken in. If there are more people winning large amounts then either the large amounts aren’t as large as in other years, or it’s because more people are collectively losing large amounts. Lotto players, considered individually, can be lucky or not; lotto players conside collectively, can’t be.
If you look carefully, though, you can see this isn’t a news story. It’s a “Sponsored Story”.
This still seems different from the “Brand Insight” that “connects readers directly to the leadership thinking of many prominent companies and organisations“, or the science and technology column by Michelle ‘Nanogirl’ Dickinson that was initially sponsored by Callaghan Innovation.
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »