{"id":417,"date":"2007-05-04T12:37:00","date_gmt":"2007-05-04T18:37:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/?p=417"},"modified":"2007-05-04T12:37:00","modified_gmt":"2007-05-04T18:37:00","slug":"journalism-by-numbers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/2007\/05\/journalism-by-numbers\/","title":{"rendered":"Journalism by numbers"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span class=\"dropcaps\">N<\/span>ext time you do a word count, check out one of the stats offered up by your word processor \u2013 the Flesch reading ease index. It was devised in the 1940s by an Austrian, <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Rudolf Flesch<\/span>, and is a simple number crunching exercise that uses the number of words per sentence, and the number of syllables per word, to put a figure on how easy something is to read. This paragraph, by way of example, has a reading ease of 63.5 \u2013 the higher the number, the easier the read.<\/p>\n<p>Indices are a product of mass information. Armies and bureaucracies love them. Now computers do too. And just as I rely increasingly on <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Google<\/span>\u2019s algorithms to search out the stories that fill up my <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">RSS<\/span> newsreader, I wonder too if I could search smarter. For me that means getting more information and less opinion.<\/p>\n<p>So, what would be the features of an index that rated the news information in reports? The things I look for?<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<ul>\n<li>Facts. I want places, organizations, names, numbers and dates. But I don\u2019t want team-sheets and lists, and I\u2019m not going to count things twice. Expressing these as a percentage won\u2019t be ideal (e.g. the United Nations Security Council is four words long but will count as one \u2018fact\u2019).<\/li>\n<p><\/p>\n<li>Attribution. I want names sitting within five words of the quotes in a story. Could be calculated by each attributed quote, or as a percentage of the reported speech word count. I prefer the latter.<\/li>\n<p><\/p>\n<li>Talk, or reported speech. I want to hear from people in a story. What\u2019s the ratio of words in quotation marks, to those out? Say 10% minimum, and a third maximum? I don\u2019t want a report to be one long quote.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>These would give you some pretty brute-force figures. They would need to be weighted, depending on assessments of the relative value of each component. They wouldn\u2019t measure a lot of the things I also want in reporting, but like food labelling they would provide some indication of what\u2019s inside a story. And just like food, it\u2019s up to you what you consume. Fact, attribution, talk \u2013 yes, let\u2019s call it the FAT content.<\/p>\n<p>To road-test these figures I looked at two reports. One was a <a href=\"http:\/\/news.bbc.co.uk\/2\/hi\/middle_east\/6464629.stm\" target=\"_blank\">dispatch<\/a> from <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">John Simpson<\/span> in Baghdad, dated 17 March 2007 \u2013 a typical blend of observation and opinion.<\/p>\n<p>The other, by contrast, was a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.centcom.mil\/sites\/usCentCom2\/FrontPage%20Stories\/Black%20Jack%20Performs%20Medical%20Mission%20in%20Baghdad.aspx\" target=\"_blank\">press release<\/a> written in the form of a news story, filed for <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">CentCom<\/span> by Sgt. 1st Class Kap Kim on 30 March 2007.<\/p>\n<p>Both pieces feature the Haifa Street area of Baghdad.<\/p>\n<p>Simpson\u2019s piece generates these stats:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<ul>\n<li>Fact ratio: 1:36. Not a bad ratio.<\/li>\n<p><\/p>\n<li>27.3% Attribution. Not so good. Although Simpson works in TV and repeats in writing what people told him on camera, there\u2019s no easy way of checking. In fact none of the quotes listed come from the video report that sits by the story. Of course, we trust him, but a brute-force method wouldn\u2019t give him the benefit of the doubt. However, Simpson quotes himself \u2013 and that keeps his attribution percentage from being zero.<\/li>\n<p><\/p>\n<li>10.1% Talk. Some of that percentage is, as noted above, Simpson quoting himself (probably not a tip for reporters starting out). Still, a macro wouldn\u2019t mind.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>The CentCom press release looks like this:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<ul>\n<li>1:35 Fact ratio. There\u2019s a lot of detail in here, but it\u2019s about the same unit.<\/li>\n<p><\/p>\n<li>89.1% Attribution. The press release generously quotes numerous military types, and gives names and units. But it slips in an anonymous Iraqi who says: \u201cWith the security plan working now, we can come out again.\u201d Yes, it\u2019s almost as convincing as \u201cAmbassador, with this Ferrero Rocher, you\u2019re really spoiling us.\u201d  <\/li>\n<p><\/p>\n<li>29.4% Talk. We hear a lot from the boots on the ground.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>The <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">BBC<\/span>\u2019s world-weary World Affairs ed is short on facts, attribution and quotes, and long on colour and judgement. His Flesch reading level is 69.1. CentCom\u2019s reporter sergeant crams his copy with attributed quotes and military detail. He scores 54.8 on the Flesch reading level.<\/p>\n<p>So do the numbers help? As <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Bobby Kennedy<\/span> said of <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">GDP<\/span>, it measures everything \u201cexcept that which makes life worthwhile.\u201d Still, if you can figure out a way to automate the numbers, or come up with a more convincing way to analyse copy, I\u2019d like to see the results. In the meantime my RSS reader keeps filling up.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Next time you do a word count, check out one of the stats offered up by your word processor \u2013 the Flesch reading ease index. It was devised in the 1940s by an Austrian, Rudolf Flesch, and is a simple number crunching exercise that uses the number of words per sentence, and the number of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[15,211],"class_list":["post-417","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-journalism","tag-bbc","tag-google"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/417","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=417"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/417\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=417"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=417"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=417"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}