[net-gold] Newspaper Quality: Local Government Accuracy: Poisson, Binomial, Normal
- From: "David P. Dillard" <jwne@xxxxxxxxxx>
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- Date: Fri, 23 Sep 2011 07:35:38 -0400 (EDT)
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Date: Thu, 22 Sep 2011 13:20:58 -0400
From: Dwight Hines <dwight.hines@xxxxxxxxx>
Reply-To: Net-Gold@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
To: Net-Gold@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [Net-Gold] Newspaper Quality: Local Government Accuracy: Poisson,
Binomial, Normal
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*
Newspaper Quality: Local Government Accuracy
Poisson, Binomial, Normal*
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Dwight Hines
Peru, Maine
September 22, 2011
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I receive regular emails from a variety
of new media organizations reporting
on innovative data gathering, data
analyses, and the graphic displays to
make information easily and cheaply
available. Yet, for all the creativity,
my concern is about quality, factual
reporting that does not waste my time
or money reading false or misleading
information. I admire and respect the
solid, verifiable work by members of
Investigative Reporters and Editors,
Computer Assisted Reporters, Empirical
Legal Studies, and the extensive,
free scholarly articles and reviews from
SSRN.
.
I don?t know if you remember when
typographical errors were recurrent
nightmares that were so common that
mathematicians used them as simple
examples for teaching different
mathematical distributions. Poisson
distributions typically gave the best
fit and because the mean equaled the
variance, that simplified calculations.
So, given that you find fact errors
in one newspaper article, can you predict
fact errors in the other newspaper
articles, like you can predict
typographical errors? Are there some
simple, practical tools that can be
developed to measure and evaluate
newspapers on quality? Such tools are
simpler than ongoing research is finding
in predicting where future articles on
topics that interest you will be located
.
(1), and how quality content interacts
with consumer expectations
.
(2a). What is facinating is that analyses
of networks are revealing useful
information that is not found when the
components of the network are
examined and tested individually.
There is predictive power in the entire
newspaper that is greater than what is
found when the parts are examined
individually
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(2b). Errors of fact not only decrease
the strength of the *Gestalt* but would
cause increased uncertainty and likely
misdirection from reality that we need to
share as members of communities.
.
Can we go further and ask if errors of
fact in newspaper articles are
predictive of a newspaper?s commercial
failure? This is a testable
question, with no shortage of data from
bankrupt, borderline, and successful
newspapers for analyses. Of course,
interpretations may be complicated by
cutbacks in staff that lead to the
increasing errors, but the question that
needs to be answered remains, how important
is journalism quality for commercial success?
.
A recent example from the *Lewiston
Sun Journal* is a good example of fact
errors (3). Reading the article you
realize quickly that Eric Conrad,
Director of Communications for the
Maine Municipal Association (MMA), the
primary source of the article?s quotes,
does not understand ?nuisance? as a
legal term. His statements, thus far,
are difficult, if not impossible to
substantiate with objective data.
For example, many of the statements
characterize motives of information
requesters, many of the statements make
it appear that reaching up to a shelf
to retrieve a document in response to
a request is highly stressful, that
requesters interfere with not just busy,
but strapped schedules, that requesters
don?t use the information, and that
requesters make requests just to abuse
government officials and employees.
.
It?s surprising that there are no
quotes about how much money has been spent
in small towns for computer systems
that have not increased information
availability or efficiency of services.
It is a paradox that the elected
officials and municipal employees who
tell us how hard their jobs are have
difficulty understanding why a plain
citizen would need to make multiple
requests for information to help
understand how our government functions.
Face it, our local governments are
complex and mysterious ? most of the
world still has local governments that
are not as effective as ours and
function by instilling cold fear in
their citizens. Let?s look at the
problem of fact errors more closely
and see what we can learn.
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It is sad that MMA, a government
agency with a computer system, PERSONIFY,
with over 8,000 queries in it?s database
from different member towns asking
for help and advice, can not access the
legal, managerial, and marketing
riches of the database in PERSONIFY.
MMA can not respond to public records
requests for PERSONIFY summary data.
PERSONIFY data breakdowns and analyses
can not be generated and are not used
for reports or research, or management
or marketing, according to MMA attorney
Gove?s response to a Maine Freedom
of Access Act request (FOAA).
It?s not good enough for MMA, with a
computer staff of 18, just to keep count
of the total number of requests and to watch
jaws drop when they tell how much PERSONIFY
costs to purchase and maintain
in yearly tax dollars. MMA?s failure to
have an adequate information
infrastructure increases their risks
when they are called to court.
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The inability of MMA to objectively
support their statements is not safe in
that the fair report privilege which
usually keeps journalists exempt from
libel complaints when quoting official
sources, does not apply to MMA (4).
Yet, the marketplace, composed of readers
like me who want accurate factual
information, and reasonably efficient
government agencies, is likely not so
forgiving, especially when factual
errors are many and Mr. Conrad and all of
MMA are supported by our taxes.
Substantial fact errors by MMA in one
article, as we see in the *Sun Journal*,
increase doubt as to the accuracy
in other articles in probabilities and
directions and amounts that can be
calculated for both the newspaper and
MMA (5).
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One way to measure accuracy is to count
the statements made by MMA in the *Sun
Journal*, separating out the compound
statements to make them easy to verify
or not. Using the Maine FOAA to request
documents and other supporting
material from MMA for the statements,
we find only three of the 30
statements are partially supported:
An error rate of 90%. Now, without
using Poisson or binomial, this would
indicate that the newspaper has
quality issues. Taking other
information into account, like the *Sun
Journal?s* inability to write about
how Peru, Maine, not only does not use
competitive bidding for substantial
contracts (auditor, assessor), but
claims they do, leads to the strong
possibility that the newspaper is in
trouble ? if not ethically, then
commercially. The lack of accurate
information is a double whammy because
it emboldens bad business practices
by local governments, like Peru, Maine,
to the point where no attempts are
made to obtain competitive bids for
heating oil. High factual error rates
not only cost the *Sun Journal*
discriminating readers but will likely
cause a loss of undiscriminating readers
because the high tax rates for towns with
poor business practices reduce reader?s
disposable income, and make the
towns unappealing to businesses (Among
the states, Maine is 50th in
attractiveness to business (6).
.
As you can see by the attached
spreadsheet, the 30 statements by Eric
Conrad, MMA, are on the left side, with
the dates of emails sent as support
for the statements along the top.
Only 3 of the 30 statements have partial
support, weak partial support. Not
cited in the article or the emails is
the only scientific study that was
conducted with Maine municipal officials
? published a month before the *Sun
Journal* article. The scientific survey
found no mention of FOAA problems by
town officials. The survey did find a
major concern of officials was the lack
of citizen participation (7).
Ironic, too, that the publisher of the
scientific survey was the Maine
Municipal Association.
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Traditionally, newspapers did, and
some still do, make government practices
public and that helped keep government
officials accountable. That
tradition, I and many others believe,
is still legitimate. In fact, it is a
tradition that people will pay money to
support. A good example of better
quality reporting can be found in the
weekly *Rumford Falls-Times*newspaper,
owned by the same company that owns the
daily *Lewiston Sun Journal*.
The *Rumford Falls-Times*, based on a
rough Poisson, reports more accurately
and is a better investment than the daily
*Sun Journal*. The former will less
likely be replaced than the latter by
machines, no matter how intelligent or
comprehensive in coverage be those
mechanical monkeys and spiders. (8-10)
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We need to quantitatively examine
relationships beween newspaper quality and
newspaper commercial success, and ask
how newspaper accuracy impacts community
viability. What could be worse for a
community than to receive false feedback
on government practices and impacts?
(11) We would have no fear from the
Department of Justice?s Antitrust Division
since Ms. Varney left (12).
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These are obvious, answerable questions
and the answers will generalize to
new media. I?d say try Poisson, (13),
and in parallel, go for a modified
rarefaction on word species (14).
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*References
*
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1) Wu, S., et al.
?Predicting Author Blog Channels with High
Value Future Posts for Monitoring.?
September, 2011,
http://www.ssrn.com/abstract=1927096
.
2a) Halbheer, D., et al.
?Optimal Sampling of Paid Content.?
June 2011
http://www.ssrn.com/abstract=1923837
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2b) Dhar, V., et al.
?The Gestalt in Graphs:
Prediction Using Economic Networks.?
2010
http://www.ssrn.com/abstract=1500834
Oestreicher-Singer, G. & Sundarajan, A.
?Visible Hand of Peer Networks in
Electronic Markets.?
2010,
http://www.ssrn.com/abstract=1268516
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3)
http://www.sunjournal.com/
river-valley/story/1073236
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4) Saharko, P.
?Reporting False Facts?,
Summer 2008
http://www.rcfp.org/news/
mag/30-3/lib-reportin.htm
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5) Bliss, C. & Fisher, R.
?Fitting the Negative Binomial
Distribution to Biological Data.?
Biometrics, 9, 1953, 176-200.
.
6)
http://www.forbes.com/2010/10/13/best-states-for-
business-business-beltway-best-states.html
.
7)
http://www.umaine.edu/
sustainabilitysolutions/
sustainability_science/
SSI_projects_yr1/pdfs/
Municipal_Official_Survey_TechReport.pdf
.
8) Liu, J. & Birnbaum, L.
?LocalSavvy: Aggregating Local Points of View
about News Issues.? ,
WWW
2008,
China
http://infolab.northwestern.edu/
media/papers/paper10168.pdf
.
9) Bruno, N.
?Will Machines Replace Journalism?,
Fall 2011,
Nieman Reports
http://www.nieman.harvard.edu/
reportsitemprint.aspx?id=102686
.
10) Iacobelli, F. et al.
?Finding New Information via Robust Entity
Detection.?
2010
Association for Artificial Intelligence
http://infolab.northwestern.edu/media/
papers/tmmWPED_20100615.pdf
.
11) Gaur, V., et al.,
?Intersubjective Meaning and Collective Action in
?Fragile? Societies. World Bank, 2010.
http://www-wds.worldbank.org/external/
default/WDSContentServer/IW3P/IB/
2011/06/23/000158349_20110623174557/
Rendered/PDF/WPS5707.pdf
.
12) Varney, C.,
?Dynamic Competition in the Newspaper Industry.?
Newspaper Association of America
2011
http://www.justice.gov/atr/public/speeches/268742.htm
She is missed.
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13) Dallal, G. Poisson Regression.
http://www.jerrydallal.com/UHSP/poisson.htm
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14) Collins, M. & Simberloff, D.
?Rarefaction and Non-random Spatial
Dispersion Patterns.?
Environ Ecol Stat
(2009) 16, 89-103.
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.
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