September 25, 2016
Briefly
- A post from Minding Data looking at the proportion of syndicated stories in the Herald. I’m not sure about the definition — some stories are edited here, and it’s not clear what it takes to not have an attribution to another paper.
- Headlines matter: an analysis of how often a news site gives multiples headline to the same news story, from the Princeton Web Transparency and Accountability Project.
- On measuring the right numbers, from Matt Levine at Bloomberg View “The infamous number is that 5,300 Wells Fargo employees were fired for setting up fake customer accounts to meet sales quotas, but it is important — and difficult — to try to put that number in context. For instance: How many employees were fired for not meeting sales quotas because they didn’t set up fake accounts? “
- Data Visualisation: how maps have shown elevation, from National Geographic — including why maps of European mountains are lit from the northwest, rather from somewhere the sun might be. (via Evelyn Lamb)
- I was Unimpressed when the authors of an unconvincing paper on GMO dangers had a ‘close-hold embargo’ — allowing journalists an advance look only if they promised not to get any expert input to their stories. It’s not any better when the FDA does it.
- What it takes to get accurate survey data on evictions, from 538
- A map of apartment rental costs in Auckland over time, by Chris McDowall, at the Spinoff.
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 »
A story at Slate about those who do peer reviews
http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2016/09/top_peer_reviewers_are_motivated_by_their_dedication_to_science.html
8 years ago
Hi there,
Thanks for the link back to Mindingdata! Good question on how much stories are edited in terms of syndication. There is actually two types of attribution that seems to take place on the Herald.
One is a large box at the bottom of the article with a blurb about Associated Press. These are completely unedited stories from the AP feed and as far as I could see, were not edited in any way from the original. These were flowing through to the Herald at the rate of about one a minute, they were certainly not being re-written to any large degree.
The second is a link at the bottom of the article that looks something like “- DailyMail” and that’s it. These I am less sure on whether it’s simply noting sources or again, is a straight copy of the article.
There were comments on Twitter about the article that I didn’t have a large enough sample base – which was fair. And that syndication seemed to be accepted for international stories, but less so for other categories. Similarly we expected Entertainment news to be mostly DailyMail trash, but we would be less happy if this was leaking to other categories. Over the next week I’m going to do a larger pull of articles from Herald.co.nz and break them down by both category and by the above different “types” of syndication to draw better results.
8 years ago