Class of 2012 Fast Start

What could the clandestine manufacture of rice wine tell readers about New York? A lot it turns out in the New York Times story Sale of Illegal Wine Thrives in Chinese Enclaves.

This is yet another story the Times has derived by mining information from the Census, or from a tip from people who are reading those stories. Readers–and you–will learn about immigrants from China, the way they live, their cultural patters and the ins and outs of alcoholic beverages. As aspiring journalists, note how deeply this story was reported.

Wait a minute: Nobody said there would be math! Many of us were drawn to writing—and journalism—because we’re not so good with numbers.

But numbers are a critical part of the work we do as reporters. Numbers may seem dull or intimidating, but when you know how to read and interpret them, you become a much smarter journalist. There are stories hidden in city budgets, profit and loss statements, and politicians’ tax returns. Poynter Online blogger Chip Scanlon once counted how many of the stories that appeared in his local paper on a single day involved numbers. The answer was more than a third, and he found them not just in the business and sports sections but in every part of the paper.

Gauge your math acumen with this basic test for journalists: www.ire.org/education/math_test.html. If you’re not thrilled with your score, read on. Here are three numeracy skills that will immediately help you become a better reporter. Overcoming a fear of numbers will help you as a journalist…we’re 100 percent sure!

Percentages

Not only do we use percentages to show change, we also use them to identify change and thereby identify news.  So percentages are important to understand and get right. Most individual numbers only take on real significance in comparison to other numbers. For example, if you read there have been 10 murders in Tribeca so far this year, you don’t know if that’s a lot or a little.  If you read that 10 murders represent a 50 percent increase over last year, the story becomes clear.

Percentages give us perspective on the relative share or size of something on a scale where 100 percent always represents the whole thing, or the original. It’s another way of presenting a fraction. 100 percent is the whole thing. 50 percent is half. 25 percent is one-quarter. If a number is cut in half, the result is a 50 percent decrease. If a number doubles, that’s a 100 percent increase (not, as many assume, a 200 percent increase).

Those among you who are math whizzes can skip ahead to the next section. For everyone else, here’s one commonly used way to find a percentage change. Look at your two numbers: your original number and your new number. Subtract the original number from the new number. Then divide that by the original number. Multiply by 100, and that’s your percentage change.

Let’s say the school budget was $10 million last year and is going to be $11 million next year. The difference is $1 million. Divide that by the original number, 10. That gives us 0.10. (Note the decimal point, it’s important.) Multiply by 100 and you get 10. So the school budget is going up by 10 percent.

Resources: For a helpful primer on percentages, including common mistakes people make in calculating them, see http://stats.org/faq_percentages.htm. Another of our favorite online sites is www.robertniles.com/stats, which covers percentages, as well as averages, data analysis and other mathematical concepts, especially for journalists.

Polls

A poll is an attempt to use the opinions of a small group of people to gauge what a larger group thinks. Such a quest, if not carefully conducted can draw questionable conclusions. Here are some key concepts:

• Probability-based sample: For a poll to be useful, the method of choosing participants must be such that anyone in the target population has a chance of inclusion. A “probability-based sample” is just a fancy term for random selection. Random-digit dialing is the dominant method for polling U.S. adults, but emerging factors such as phone-number portability make it difficult to include cellphones, and because a growing swath of young Americans are cellphone-only users, this surveying technique is becoming less representative. Still, it is more accurate than self-selected samples such as people who choose to answer an online survey.
• Margin of sampling error: Every poll has a margin of error. The bigger the pool of respondents, the smaller the margin of error. For example, a poll that surveys 400 people has a margin of error of plus or minus 6 percent, whereas a poll that surveys 2,500 people has a margin of error of plus or minus 2 percent.
• How to “read” a margin of error: You must add and subtract the margin of error from the results. So when the margin of error is plus or minus 6 percent, that means that if 73 percent of people surveyed answer yes, all that can be known is that between 67 percent (-6) and 79 percent (+6) of people in the larger population would be favorable.
• Why 1,000 respondents is the sweet spot: When respondents are in the hundreds, the margin of error is wide. But when a poll reaches about 1,000 people, it levels off at plus or minus 3 percent and climbs slowly from there. Any increased accuracy after 1,000 people requires a lot more polling (read time and money), so that number has become the norm.

Resources: The Poynter Institute offers a three-hour online class for journalists on polling, free of charge: http://www.newsu.org/courses/understanding-and-interpreting-polls.

Scientific Studies

Journalists cover the results of medical studies all the time, but too often their lack of perspective leads to confusing stories. “Such-and-such thing is bad for you,” one report goes, and then months later comes the news that the same thing is actually beneficial. Here’s how to interpret studies more critically.

• Causation vs. correlation: Just because two things are associated does not mean they are related. Yet so often when researchers find that, say, people who drink a lot of coffee are more likely to have some kind of health problem, journalists erroneously assert that coffee causes the health problem. In fact, the news is simply that coffee is associated with the health problem—there may be no causal relationship whatsoever. Our favorite example of this kind of fallacious reasoning is the observation that most children are taller at the end of kindergarten. But does that make it reasonable to conclude that kindergarten makes children grow?
• Relative vs. absolute risk: When the risk of something is very low, even the tiniest increase can sound dramatic. For example, let’s say that in Cerealville, USA, one person per year, on average, chokes on a Cheerio. Now imagine that all of a sudden, two people start dying that way each year. The Cheerio choking risk has doubled. That sounds awful, doesn’t it? People in Cerealville are twice as likely to choke on a Cheerio as they were in the past. The relative risk (compared to what it had been) is up 100 percent. But the absolute risk is still unimaginably small—in our hypothetical, .00002 percent instead of .00001 percent. It’s important to analyze, and provide readers with, the absolute as well as the relative risk.
• Statistically significant: This term refers to how likely it is that a finding is not due to chance.

Resources: An extremely helpful book is News & Numbers: A Writer’s Guide to Statistics, by Victor Cohn and Lewis Cope. The third edition of this classic will be released in September 2011 and can be pre-ordered at amazon.com. Another useful book is Numbers in the Newsroom: Using Math and Statistics in News, available at the online bookstore of Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE): http://www.ire.org/store/books/.

An invaluable web resource is STATS: http://stats.org. This non-partisan, non-profit site focuses on helping journalists think quantitatively, and provides many well-explained backgrounders.

In covering the various neighborhoods of the city, you will find many that are distinctive because of their ethnic, religious and cultural makeup. The New York Times probes the issues in the Orthodox Jewish neighborhood of Brooklyn, shaken by the murder of an 8-year-old child, in Leiby Kletsky’s Killing Rattles a Community’s Trust in Its Own.

This has been one of the most covered crime stories of recent years because it is so unusual. If you have been reading the coverage, you know every print and broadcast outlet has done multiple stories each day.

This story will tell you about one area of the city. You should also consider the way the Times used its insights and reporting to find a way to continue the coverage into a fourth day. One of your constant challenges will be finding a new angle on a heavily covered story–no matter what area of journalism you eventually pursue.

The British tabloid scandal grows worse by the day and so does the tightening circle around media mogul Rupert Murdoch. The Daily Beast takes a look at how Murdoch’s New York Post operates in Murdoch’s U.S. Tabloid Scandal. The story doesn’t cover any new ground for those of us who know the Post, but it is important information for you, especially if you get the chance to intern or work there. And some J School students do that.

The New York Times remembered that adage as it examined the tremendous growth in subway traffic on the weekends, a sign of how much New York has changed (read improved) in the past two decades.

This story tells you a lot about the city, and journalism techniques. Note how the Times ignored the usual rule about an immediate peg to hook the story to a long term trend, although it did use the recent cutbacks as a way to give the story some immediacy.

And then note how they buried a key fact that hurt their thesis. Despite the general thrust the the story, ridership on the weekends remains half that of during the week.

I don’t what it is in store for you in the first-semester legal and ethics class, but the New York Post has presented a classic case study with its weekend stories alleging the housekeeper in the DSK case is a prostitute who had traded sex for money while working at the hotel and even while under protection of the Manhattan DA.

Here is the first story in a series of pieces by the Post. Check out the sourcing, or the lack thereof. A friend of mine who used to hold a high level job at the Post tells me the reporter is a well respected journalist who can be trusted to adhere to professional standards. I guess we will see about that.

In the meantime, the woman has responded with a libel suit against the Post.

This isn’t the only legal problem for Post owner News Corp. Check out the stories about the phone hacking scandal involving their newspapers in the U.K.

Politics has become a 24/7, 365 days a year obsession for many media outlets and there is an explosion of jobs at places like politico.com and elsewhere. It is true in New York as well. Today, the Wall Street Journal surveyed the field for the 2013 mayoral race with a long 29 months to go before voters go to the polls.

The story is pasted below (because it is behind the pay wall at the Journal). It will give you an idea of the political landscape in the city.

Also, with the 2012 election campaign likely to be at a fever pitch in the spring, you might want to consider taking Peter Beinart’s National Political Reporting class, which is a second semester elective.

Staking Out Slot In Race for Mayor

By Michael Howard Saul

(Copyright (c) 2011, Dow Jones & Company, Inc.)

A week after Rep. Anthony Weiner resigned and all but dashed his chances of becoming the city’s next mayor, Public Advocate Bill de Blasio held court under the chandeliers of a Waldorf-Astoria ballroom.

“I give Anthony credit for having talked about a lot of the economic reality that people are facing [and] obviously for focusing, particularly, on the needs of the outer boroughs,” Mr. de Blasio said during an interview with The Wall Street Journal at the Midtown hotel, where he was holding a fund-raiser. “That’s something I’m doing as public advocate. I’m certainly going to be doing a lot of that as I talk about what our economy is doing.”

In the wake of Mr. Weiner’s sudden exit from Congress after admitting he engaged in lewd online exchanges with women, Mr. de Blasio and other potential mayoral candidates are moving quickly to seize the opportunity left by Mr. Weiner’s political collapse. Mr. Weiner, who represented a swath of Queens and Brooklyn for 12 1/2 years, was considered a front-runner in the 2013 race.

People familiar with the public advocate’s thinking said Mr. de Blasio believes he is well-positioned to assume Mr. Weiner’s mantle as champion of the middle-class and the boroughs outside Manhattan.

Another person, speaking about Mr. de Blasio’s thinking regarding the new post-Weiner landscape, said, “It’s now clearer than ever to Bill and his supporters that the stars are aligned for 2013, and Bill is capitalizing on it.”

Certainly, Mr. de Blasio, a former Brooklyn City Council member who served as campaign manager for Hillary Clinton’s successful bid for the U.S. Senate in 2000, isn’t the only potential candidate hoping to grab hold of Mr. Weiner’s political base.

City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer and former Comptroller Bill Thompson — each potential nods for the Democratic nomination — are also looking at ways they can attract voters who might have been leaning toward Mr. Weiner.

During his formal remarks at the June 23 fund-raiser, Mr. de Blasio didn’t mention Mr. Weiner by name. But after weeks of intense public scrutiny into Mr. Weiner’s personal life — he’s married to Huma Abedin, an aide to Mrs. Clinton, and they’re expecting their first child — Mr. de Blasio sought to present to his supporters a picture of domestic bliss.

“Bill still brings me home flowers,” his wife, Chirlane McCray, told the crowd of roughly 200 who generated $250,000 for her husband’s campaign. “Awww,” the crowd cooed.

“For me it was absolutely love at first sight,” Mr. de Blasio said. “For her, it took quite a bit longer.”

Mr. de Blasio also introduced the couple’s children and made reference to the challenges of an interracial marriage. Mr. de Blasio is white; Ms. McCray is black.

“We weren’t sure, you know, how we could make this work,” he said, referring to their initial courtship when they met during David Dinkins’s administration two decades ago.

In an interview, Ms. McCray said she wants her husband to run for mayor. “I’m right beside him,” she said. “He’s born to lead.”

Mr. de Blasio said the city’s economic future is the issue that is at the forefront of New Yorkers’ minds. “This city government right now is saying and doing precious little to create jobs, and it’s my job to do something about it,” he said. (Mayor Michael Bloomberg has long defended his record promoting economic development and steering the city through the recession.)

Like other potential candidates, Mr. de Blasio faces plenty of challenges, most notably a lack of name recognition citywide.

A NY1-Marist poll from April showed Mr. de Blasio toward the bottom of the pack of potential Democratic mayoral contenders. According to the poll, 9% of Democrats said they would support him, compared with 15% for Mr. Thompson and 13% for both Ms. Quinn and City Comptroller John Liu, another potential candidate. In that poll, 18% said they supported Mr. Weiner and 4% backed Mr. Stringer, while 27% were undecided.

As public advocate, Mr. de Blasio is next in line of succession to the mayor. But his governmental authority is much more limited than, for example, Ms. Quinn, who is arguably the second most powerful official in city government.

Both Ms. Quinn and Mr. Liu also have the advantage of luring voters with the potential for a historic mayoral election: Ms. Quinn would be the city’s first female and openly gay mayor, and Mr. Liu would be the city’s first Asian-American mayor.

Mr. de Blasio’s longstanding liberal views — he’s called on the president to move faster to end the war in Afghanistan and he’s leading a national campaign against corporate political spending — could appeal to many of the left-leaning members of the Democratic Party who vote in the primary.

But his views could pose problems in a general election, especially in the more conservative neighborhoods outside Manhattan.

With the race more than two years away, Mr. de Blasio is focused on locking up supporters and financial backers. He has lured some celebrity power in actress Cynthia Nixon, one of the stars of “Sex and the City” and a longtime New York activist.

“Bill would be a great mayor,” she said. “He’s a really rare combination of a totally savvy, astute political thinker and a person who won’t compromise on his values.”

In mid June, the New York Times put together a profile of the housekeeper who had accused powerful French politician Dominique Strauss Kahn of rape.

“In dozens of interviews with people who know her or are familiar with her life, the woman, now 32, is portrayed as an unassuming and hard-working single mother. The interviews were conducted in New York and in her homeland, Guinea, with relatives, neighbors, co-workers and former employers. The woman herself has stayed out of public view in recent weeks and has not spoken to reporters,” is the story’s nut graph.

`’She is a village girl who didn’t go to school to learn English, Greek, Portuguese, what have you,” said her older brother, 49, whose first name is Mamoudou. ”All she learned was the Koran. Can you imagine how on earth she is suffering through this ordeal?”

There are few things more painful that doing a story like this and having it revealed that you couldn’t get people to tell you the truth or that you didn’t dig hard enough.

So the Times went back on the story. Saturday, it published the inside story of how the prosecutors had discovered the woman had lied on her immigration application as well as to them about the incident and many aspects of her life.

Why did the Times reporters not discover any hints of the complications in this story? How would you have reported the story?