Tag Archives: journalism

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Hype and headlines: looking beyond the abstract

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immigration hate-hype in a UK tabloid newspaperWe try our best here at Futurismic to look beyond the sensational aspects of the news and dig into the real implications. Over at his place, Charlie Stross dissects the latest alcohol and cancer risk stories as covered in the mainstream media, and points out why it’s important to do so:

Alas, the Journal of the National Cancer Institute keeps the actual text behind a paywall; which makes it hard for me to check this takedown by Junkfood Science. However, I feel the need to quote two chunks of that post (which you really ought to read):

… there was no dose response between the number of drinks the women consumed and their risk for all cancers. Women drinking no alcohol at all had higher incidences for all cancers than 95% of the drinking women. The actual incidents of all cancers was 5.7% among the nondrinkers. The cancer incidents were lower among the women drinking up to 15 drinks a week: 5.2% among those consuming ≤2 drinks/week; 5.2% of those drinking 3-6 drinks/week; and 5.3% among those drinking 7-14 drinks a week. [Table 1.]

In other words, women drinking as many as two drinks a day were associated with lower actual incidences of all cancers compared with the nondrinkers.

In other words, the abstract of the paper was radically at odds with the substance of the study’s findings.

In other words, good news doesn’t sell newspapers… nor say what certain groups may want us to hear.

One can’t help but wonder how much of this is to do with the way the state funds scientific research; Ceaser hears what is pleasing unto Ceaser, AMIRITE? I’m guessing a lab or body that consistently finds results opposite to the ones desired isn’t going to get so many gigs offered to it further down the line… which isn’t to accuse scientists of lying so much as to accuse the bureaucracy that surrounds science of making concessions to external forces. [image by secretlondon123]

But then I wonder if I’m slipping into the conspiracist paranoia of my youth again. Who can we trust to tell us truth? Does the new multiplicity of news sources with different ideological filters make this problem smaller or larger?

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Gender differences in perception of beauty

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This little bit of neurological research is all over the news outlets at the moment. Here in the UK, The Guardian leads their piece with the headline “Women appreciate beauty better than men, says study“.

Brain scans of people looking at paintings and photographs have revealed that beauty is not only in the eye of the beholder. When men and women see something they think is beautiful, their brains react differently, with the female brain showing more activity than the male, according to new research.

[snip]

The researchers believe the different responses are linked to the ways in which men and women process spatial information, but suggest that men may tend to look only at the picture as a whole, while women also pay attention to the smaller details.

We never seem to tire of these gender difference studies, do we? It’s as if we thought we were having something we’d always known proved to us, no matter what the actual meaning may be at a scientific level.

But it’s always interesting to watch how they’re reported by different media channels. So, for extra points, here’s Big Blog of Cheese running the comparisons – why not play along with headlines from your own country?

BBC: Art appreciation ‘a gender issue’

Science journal: Sex-related similarities and differences in the neural correlates of beauty

Daily Telegraph: Why women cannot read maps and men lose their keys

Headlines and links in the comments, please!

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Web not killing journalism, improving it

newspaper with blogging headlineWe’ve heard plenty of worrying from journalists about how the death of print newspapers will be the death of journalism itself, so here’s a contrary view from within the same camp. Jim Stovall of JPROF suggests that the medium of newspapers is actually part of the problem, and that journalism will be improved once it is no longer chained to the printing press.

He provides a number of reasons for optimism, of which I think this is the most telling:

More reporters. Students in my experience are wildly excited about this new age of journalism. I am honored to be the faculty adviser to the Tennessee Journalist, the student operated news web site of the School of Journalism and Electronic Media at the University of Tennessee. More than 35 people regularly show up at our weekly staff meeting (only the editors are required to come) and the numbers are growing. The number of our majors has grown from 350 to 450 in just one year.

What has caused this, I wonder? The tempting conclusion is that the ease of self-publication has made people less intimidated by the idea of producing writing in public, but maybe it’s also to do with the erosion of the media monoculture – the web has provided a space for dissenting voices and niche interests that newspapers couldn’t support, tied as they are to physical locations.

Whatever the cause, it’s good to see some optimism. Journalism was born out of the desire to learn and communicate, and it looks like that desire has been increased rather than eroded. Who knew? [via TechDirt; image by Annie Mole]

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Seth Godin asks what we’ll miss about printed newspapers

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newspapersWhen newspapers are gone, what will you miss? asks Seth Godin. His answer? Not a great deal. He takes the opposite view to the journalists who tell us that the ‘proper’ investigative journalism will be killed off by the migration to the web:

… if we really care about the investigation and the analysis, we’ll pay for it one way or another. Maybe it’s a public good, a non profit function. Maybe a philanthropist puts up money for prizes. Maybe the Woodward and Bernstein of 2017 make so much money from breaking a story that it leads to a whole new generation of journalists.

The reality is that this sort of journalism is relatively cheap (compared to everything else the newspaper had to do in order to bring it to us.) Newspapers took two cents of journalism and wrapped in ninety-eight cents of overhead and distraction.

The obvious response here, especially from anyone in journalism, is going to be “well, what the hell does Godin know about running a newspaper?” I can’t answer that question, but I do know that Godin understands marketing, economics and human nature pretty well, and I have to say there’s something very logical about what he’s saying.

Or am I just being sold the story I want to hear? [image by drb62]

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What will become the next non-monetary economy?

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Chris “Long Tail” Anderson has an interesting guest post from Adam Gurri that discusses non-monetary economies, like the acting profession:

The thing about acting is that the labor force (actors) actually value the ability to do work in that field that they are willing to take on work for nothing and take on other jobs as a sort of cross-subsidy.  There is a sort of demand for employment in theater, which makes competition among actors so fierce as to actually drive down wages (at time of entry at least) to zero or near zero.

His argument continues that many content-creation jobs (like blogging about your profession, for example) have such low overheads that they’re cutting the feet out from under journalists, who were paid to have the time to research topics they probably didn’t know much about to start with. There’s still ‘room at the top’ for good writers with deep knowledge (whether they started as journalists or experts), but the old career path from copyboy upwards seems to be gone for good.

Whether you see that as a good thing or a bad thing probably depends on what sort of work you do, but I think we can all agree it’s happening. The question is – after journalism, what will be the next to fall? And might the flow of money be supplemented by some sort of reputational currency, like whuffie?