Open door: The readers' editor on … pulling opinion polls apart | Comment is free | The Guardian January 19, 2009
Posted by Jonathan Hewett in : delicious links , add a commentTake care with news stories based on polls and surveys. Siobhain Butterworth:??"The journalist had missed a footnote which said: "Survey respondents are not representative of all primary and secondary school teachers in England and Wales by subject specialism." It cautioned against statements such as "65% of all science teachers disagree that creationism should be taught".[…]??The British Polling Council's website publishes a journalist's guide to opinion polls, which covers issues such as sample size and methods of ensuring that samples are representative. The BPC checklist encourages journalists to ask who conducted the poll, who paid for it and why it was done."
Does online-only news narrow readers’ understanding? | The Australian October 12, 2008
Posted by Jonathan Hewett in : delicious links , add a commentThat’s what an Australian ad/comms agency suggests, drawing on its survey of 200 people:
“…by using online as an exclusive source of news people are starting to consume more information but — and this is the important point — across fewer topic areas. […]
…as consumers of news we’re becoming increasingly intelligent or knowledgeable about very niche topic areas, but from an overall perspective, our understanding of world and national events is a bit more superficial. […]
…70.1 per cent claimed that the internet allows them to avoid news topics that are not of interest. […]
…online news readers are not typically venturing outside the same few topics or information areas — 59.9 per cent tend to read information from the same sections.[…] However, 62.7 per cent of people claim that when they buy a paper they often read articles that they hadn’t intended to.”
Is crowd-sourcing edging into mainstream journalism — or is it just an online survey? October 8, 2008
Posted by Jonathan Hewett in : Journalism, National newspapers, News, Online, citizen journalism, reporting , add a commentHow far did asking readers for their input help Jay Rayner with his Observer article on genetically modified foods, published last Sunday? He found it a mixed bag — and a lot more work, he says.
It involved digesting hundreds of emails and online comments, says Rayner, including 159 comments on the original request online — but:
In the end, although I didn’t set out to do it this way, almost every single research paper I consulted came via our call to arms, as did three of the four main interviewees (two from each side).
My impression is that this kind of crowd-sourcing has been edging more into mainstream journalism — but often in a different way from Rayner’s “exercise in open-source journalism” (as he calls it).
Take another current example: the BBC’s iPM asking for readers/listeners to flag up what element of their spending has been hit hardest by the ‘credit crunch’, which it’s plotting on a map. Similarly, the Times Online sought readers’ comments on its 2008 Budget Survey, plotting them on a Google map — Andy Dickinson helped out. This survey-style approach is automated, of course, and so can handle large numbers of responses — clearly essential when we’re talking about more than 22,000 responses, as with iPM.
There may be a trade-off. Go for as many responses as possible, with a narrow set of questions and possible responses (so it can be readily automated). A large response might make results more reliable and/or representative. But it’s still essentially a survey, even if it has the online equivalent of bells and whistles.
On the other hand, a Rayner-style invitation to contribute is more blog-like and open-ended — which means a human has to read and digest the responses. But a ‘click here’ survey wouldn’t get you research papers and interviewees.
In the end I suspect there’s a place for open-ended crowd-sourcing, surveys, and much in between. Including pointers that help to produce a scoop.