Tag Archives: media

Media looks for ways to better measure fragmented audience

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As media platforms proliferate, media companies are looking for better ways to measure their audience:

“We have Omniture data, comScore, Nielsen, some of our internal metrics that we look at — they don’t match,” Wert said.

Hampering the effort are audiences splintering into ever smaller shards as they use an array of outlets and platforms — including websites, mobile devices, print and broadcast…

The tinier the pieces the more precious each becomes. It’s more important than ever for traditional media looking to cover the costs of producing content to deliver to marketers as much information as possible about who’s watching, reading and listening.

Arguably, technology has made the measurement systems better than ever. But the result is counterintuitive: Consumers are followed more closely but the numbers don’t always add up, and it’s not clear how to put a value on those numbers…

Nielsen’s Patrick Dineen, senior vice president of local television audience measurement, said it’s “wildly inappropriate” to try to track audiences through one medium. Kevin Gallagher, executive vice president and local director at Starcom, said his firm has replaced talk of traditional media planning with something that tracks targeted consumers’ daily interaction with media.

Getting the right numbers means media companies will be able to more accurately gauge advertising, particularly target audiences, and then make more money. Solving these issues and appropriately valuing these media interactions will be a huge issue moving forward and whoever can do it first or do it best could have an advantage.

Sociologist Claude Fischer to begin new column shedding sociological light on popular debates

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Sociologist Claude Fischer will soon begin a new column in the Boston Review that “will take on the fashionable ideas about American social life reported in the mainstream media and expose them to scientific scrutiny.” Here is why Fischer says the public needs the sociological perspective applied to popular debates:

DJ: The “culture of poverty” debate has been reignited recently by Charles Murray, whose cultural analysis, you write, is “not serious.” He is one among many “thought leaders” to gain a wide audience for unserious views. How much blame do you think academic experts bear for ceding the public sphere to these modern-day sophists?

CF: “Sophist” (defined—I had to look it up—as one skilled in devious argumentation) is not quite the term I would use. While Murray’s particular argument about the origins of white, working-class culture cannot be taken seriously, much of what he has argued, in The Bell Curve, for example, is serious, even if, as colleagues and I have argued (in Inequality by Design), it is wrong. On the broader point: Yes, mainstream social scientists have been under-represented in public debates (not economists, however; they seem omnipresent). For many years, I have pressed my colleagues to tell more of what we know to the wider public. In the early 2000s, I was the founding editor of Contexts, a magazine of the American Sociological Association for general readers, a sort of poor man’s Social Scientific American. For various reasons, it did not find a place on airport magazine racks and, although it thrives (see contexts.org), the magazine mostly reaches sociologists and our students. Among the reasons we sociologists have been largely absent in the public dialogue include chronically abysmal writing, too-frequent PC-ness, and not trying enough. But the failure is also on the media’s side—for example, the taste for the sensational (see above), a short attention span, and a desperation for content. (In the latter regard, social science findings are rarely discovered by journalists; they are usually delivered by publicists and often large p.r. campaigns—see Murray, above.) Both sides share some responsibility for the vacuum.

DJ: Do you think American ignorance of sociological facts is akin to our ignorance of scientific facts, or is there something more to the story?

CF: Of course, most Americans are too busy to recall much of the science—or the history, for that matter—that they learned in school (many were too busy during school to learn it, too). While we academics put a weirdly high value on knowing bookish facts, social scientific knowledge is consequential for both society and individuals—say, understanding how schools’ organizational structures might affect learning. Social science in particular has some properties that make public awareness especially difficult. For one, people generally think they already know all that stuff. After all, they live in society; they don’t need to be told about it by some egghead. Such confidence, by the way, is one reason why people often respond to a piece of social science research by saying it is obvious—after hearing what the finding is. (Pick one: money makes people happier; money doesn’t make people happier. Either way the research comes out, many will say the result is obvious. Duncan Watts also discusses this phenomenon in his new book, Everything Is Obvious: *Once You Know the Answer.) Second, people tend to believe comfortable facts. This is true in the natural sciences, too. (My Berkeley colleague, Robb Willer, has found that people are more likely to dismiss global warming as real if they are first told that it would cost a lot to mitigate it.) This shaping of empirical belief is multiplied in the social sciences. For example, the well-off are especially likely to believe that good fortune has nothing to do with success; it is all the result of talent and effort.

I’m looking forward to a good defense of sociology as well as insights into American life and culture.

Implications of “illegal immigration hits net-zero”

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Here is another consequence of the American economic crisis: the flow of undocumented immigrants to the United States has hit “net-zero.”

One million Mexicans said they returned from the US between 2005 and 2010, according to a new demographic study of Mexican census data. That’s three times the number who said they’d returned in the previous five-year period.

And they aren’t just home for a visit: One prominent sociologist in the US has counted “net zero” migration for the first time since the 1960s.

Experts say the implications for both nations are enormous – from the draining of a labor pool in the US to the need for a radical shift in policies in Mexico, which has long depended on the billions of dollars in migrant remittances as a social welfare cornerstone.

“The massive return of migrants will have implications at the micro and macro economic levels and will have consequences for the social fabric … especially for the structure of the Mexican family,” says Rodolfo Casillas, a migration expert at the Latin American School of Social Sciences in Mexico City.

Sociologist Douglas Massey provides more details about what has happened:

The migration explosion that since the 1970s had pushed millions of men, women, and children into the United States has fizzled, says Douglas Massey, a sociologist at Princeton University and codirector of the long-term, binational Mexican Migration Project. “We’re at a turning point, and what unfolds in the future remains to be seen. But I think the boom is over.”

Mr. Massey’s research shows that after the US recession hit, the illegal population fell from about 12 million to 11 million, where it has hovered since 2009. (About 60 percent of the illegal population is Mexican.)

Similarly, Homeland Security estimates released in March suggest that while the number of unauthorized immigrants living in the US grew 36 percent between 2000 and 2011, from 8.5 million to 11.5 million, that growth plateaued in 2010 and 2011.

“With no change in either direction, we’re roughly at a net zero,” says Massey, and adds that it’s something unseen since the late 1950s.

This bears watching. Now that I think about it, we have heard little about this topic on a national scale in recent months. Do the majority of Americans only care about this issue under certain circumstances? Thinking more broadly, does American news coverage focus on only a narrow set of issues (such as jobs, political responses and approval ratings, spending vs. accumulating debt, possible solutions) during an economic crisis rather than looking at the broad range of social spheres, including the relationships between the United States and other countries, affected by a downturn?

Sociologist: Canadians and Americans are more alike than people might think

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A Canadian sociologist argues that Americans and Canadians are quite similar:

But experts suggest English Canadians — though the QMI Agency poll found we’re still divided whether stereotyping is widespread — are alike on most fronts.

In fact, so much so that most of us could blend in with our U.S. cousins, according to one scholar.

Ed Grabb, a professor in the University of British Columbia’s Department of Sociology, has begun a new course outlining how Canadians and Americans, while not identical, are more alike than most of us would have thought.

In fact, on things like attitudes toward health care, government and individuality, research has found we’re very similar.

Even differences in religion are shrinking. In 1991, Americans were 16% more likely than Canadians to take in a religious service at least once a week.

By 2006, that number had dropped to 11%.

While Grabb sees regional differences in both countries — during national elections, Quebec generally pulls Canada to the left just as the southern U.S. pulls that nation to the right — he’s also noticed a softening of old hackneyed chestnuts.

“I do think the Alberta redneck jibe is an endangered species,” Grabb said.

“I think that the assumption that all Ontarians are affluent is also going by the boards.

It would be interesting to see comparisons across the board: income, political and social views (both at home and abroad), religion, education, and consumer purchases and entertainment choices. Then, compare these to what Americans and Canadians think about each other. Why do I think Canadians would know way more about Americans than the other way around?

I also want to know how to explain this. Both the United States and Canada are settler colonies but we have different histories as Canada has had a different relationship with Great Britain in the last few centuries. Perhaps people might fall back on the frontier hypothesis since both countries pursued territorial expansion and span between two different (geographically and cultural) coasts. Perhaps today we tend to share a lot of media and cultural influences. For example, how many Americans care or would they have been able to tell without being told that Justin Bieber is Canadian. Perhaps our geopolitical position away from major international wars has led to similar ways of viewing the world. Perhaps the better way to differentiate between the countries is to refer to the “Jesusland” map where Canada joins with the East and West American coasts plus some of the Great Lakes states and red America is the south, great plains, and mountain west.

Why two media sources ranking the world’s wealthiest people is a good thing

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While Forbes had the corner on the market for years in compiling a ranking of the world’s richest people, there is now another option: this week Bloomberg released its Billionaires Index. One commentator thinks we don’t need both Forbes and Bloomberg examining this topic:

The Forbes list, available online today, is published every March. (Its companion, the “Forbes 400” list of richest Americans published in September.) It’s hard to not feel that Bloomberg’s outing takes some of the air out of Forbes usually-hyped cover story on who are the world’s richest people. This year’s edition proves unexciting not only because there were few shake-ups in the top spots from 2011’s list, but also because these rankings don’t appear all that different from Bloomberg’s.

Highlights from 2012’s version: With $69 billion, Mexico’s Carlos Slim Helu ranks No. 1 again for the third year in the row. (The magazine also profiled him.) Helu was followed by another 1,225 billionaires, starting with Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, and Bernard Arnault (of Louis Vuitton fame), who were also two through four last year. But beside no one being knocked off the top of this year’s Forbes list, it’s markedly similar to how rich Bloomberg News told us these folks were. Here’s a side-by-side comparison, with Forbes on the left and Bloomberg on the right.

So there are slight differences. Bloomberg has Arnault one spot lower and places fashion mogul Amancio Ortega down to seventh. Bloomberg puts the Koch brothers in the top 10, whereas Forbes had them both pegged at 12th. But isn’t this hair-splitting? If anything, the discrepancies show how hard it is to measure rich people’s riches.

What today’s Forbes list shows more than anything is that we don’t need two billionaires lists reminding us how wealthy the wealthy are. If we had to choose one, we’d go with Bloomberg’s, since it’s updated daily instead of once a year. But we doubt that will stop Forbes from producing its longstanding annual issue as long folks keep buying it.

I disagree. Here is why: I think that having two media sources looking at this topic will actually give readers better information. With two publications tackling the subject, I hope this improves their measurement of wealth for both publications. Perhaps we could average the rankings across the publications to get a more accurate assessment of what is going on. In the end, two sets of people looking at the data is better than one. Because Bloomberg is updating this list daily, perhaps this will push Forbes to update their lists more frequently and move away from a magazine era schedule to an Internet era schedule. The two lists do have some differences and this is not inconsequential. Lots of people are interested in this list and I’m sure some of the people at the top of the list have some interest in where they rank. Of course, these differences can indicate “how hard it is to measure rich people’s riches” but this doesn’t mean we should just throw up our hands and go with one list. Just because these people are really wealthy doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t have more fine-grained analysis of their financial holdings. (This sometimes seems to happen quite a bit in sociology: we assume we know about the elites and so spend more time studying marginalized groups but we have fewer in-depth studies of the elites who do have a lot of influence in society.)

A second issue: Bloomberg obviously thinks there is a market for another list that is updated daily and so this is a market decision as well as a journalistic interest in updating this information more frequently. The Forbes list always gets a lot of attention and Bloomberg probably wants to draw away some of that market. I imagine there is enough room in the market for both lists to survive, particularly as the two could serve different markets. However, it will be interesting to see how the rest of the media responds to changes in the Bloomberg list: if someone moves up from #3 to #2 in the next few days, will there be news stories about it? Will journalists providing background information about the wealthy reference the Forbes or the Bloomberg list?

Sociologist to journalists: “Racism: Not Isolated Incidents but Systemic”

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After several recent incidences in East Haven, Connecticut, a sociologist explains why racism is a systemic issue, not a matter of a few racist individuals:

As a sociology professor whose specialties include the study of racism, I am sometimes asked to explain what is happening following such a flurry of racist incidents. That question is based on the faulty assumptions that what is happening now is something new and that what occurred is no more than a disturbing accumulation of isolated incidents of racial bigotry committed by a few Neanderthals who didn’t get the memo that in today’s colorblind America we have moved past all that.

Social structures, racist, or otherwise, don’t just disappear or grow old and die. Consequently, when I get that “what is happening now?” query from the press, I feel like yawning as I mutter, “There you go again.” Lately I have advised reporters to connect the dots. I challenge them to, for once, abandon racism-evasive language such as “race” or “the race issue” and to call the thing what it is, racism, which is by its nature always systemic.

So far, to my knowledge, no reporter has taken my advice. Instead they tend to write stories that, if they even acknowledge a pattern of racist incidents, seem to attribute it to the bad economy, the coming of a full moon or perhaps some foul-smelling concoction that was secretly slipped into our drinking water. Then they go away for another few months; and when still more overtly racist stuff happens, they email again to ask me to explain, once more, what is happening, now.

Unfortunately that type of news reporting supports the dominant response to racism by European Americans — the militant denial of its existence or significance. A very successful racism denial tactic is to conveniently confuse the racial, bigoted attitudes and behaviors of some person of color with systemic racism as a way of suggesting that white racism is no more of a problem than is so-called black racism. On other occasions a person of color may be accused of being a racist for simply bringing up the issue of racism.

This is a message needed for more than just journalists.

I wonder if journalists are any better on this issue than average Americans. On the whole, Americans often privilege individualistic situations to social problems, race or otherwise. White Americans, in particular, would prefer to act like race doesn’t matter and claim that we should move on. I’ve noted before that the reverse should be true: Americans should have to show that race isn’t involved in social situations instead of suggesting it doesn’t matter until there is incontrovertible proof otherwise.

Is Charles Murray really a sociologist?

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I’ve seen a number of news stories about Charles Murray’s latest book and one thing caught my eye: the claim that Murray is a sociologist. (See examples from the Philadelphia Inquirer, BusinessWeek, and the National Catholic Reporter.) Is he really?

Murray’s page at his current scholarly home, the American Enterprise Institute, says he is a “political scientist, author, and libertarian.”

Wikipedia’s main entry for Murray clearly calls him a political scientist and records his PhD in political science but this list of sociologists includes Murray.

Perhaps the confusion comes from the fact that Murray is working with a lot of topics that are commonly covered by sociology such as race, social class, and family life. Even the New York Times describes his work as sociology:

Few people today would dismiss the idea that values, culture and intelligence all play a role in economic success. But it is hard to know what to make of some of Murray’s findings. As with David Brooks’s “Bobos in Paradise,”Murray’s sociology depends a lot on his own, sometimes highly idiosyncratic, fieldwork. To demonstrate that the elite are more likely to drive foreign cars than domestic ones, Murray notes the makes of automobiles in a couple of mall parking lots. In an otherwise persuasive chapter arguing that Ivy League graduates tend to live near one another, Murray quotes a remark by Michael Barone, the conservative commentator, complaining about the profusion of Harvard and Yale graduates on his former block. If Murray believes that wealthy yuppies suffer from creeping nonjudgmentalism, I invite him to spend an hour on UrbanBaby.com.

This quote suggests that Murray’s work is sociology because he is explaining sociological phenomena, not because he is working within the sociological tradition, utilizing sociological theories and methods, or even thinking like a typical sociologist. Practicing sociology (sometimes termed “pop sociology”) is quite different from being a sociologist. Is this simply lazy journalism or a bigger problem in that people don’t know how sociologists actually go about their work?

In a related question, how many sociologists would claim Murray is a sociologist? First, this could be tied to whether he is practicing good sociology. Second, this could be about whether he is espousing ideas that fit with sociological theories and data (and they generally don’t). How many sociologists would want to add libertarian as a descriptor of their image?

TMQ takes apart “police procedurals” (otherwise known as crime shows)

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After some analysis of the Super Bowl, Tuesday Morning Quarterback gets down to his real business of dissecting “police procedurals.” Here are some points I appreciated:

Television is swamped in police dramas. During a recent week, 14 of the 45 Big Three prime-time hours were crime shows. Except they no longer are called that — the genre is now “procedurals.” In theory this means the shows depict police procedure. In practice, being a procedural means a formula. Here it is…[a 15 point formula follows]

On TV, cops exist in constant jeopardy of life and limb. This, though “most police officers retire at the end of a 20- or 25-year career without ever having fired a weapon other than at the practice range.” Despite the bullets ricocheting around them, TV detectives are NEVER frightened. Most are spoiling to charge headlong into obvious danger…

But isn’t the violence realism? In the world of TV, murder and mayhem are an epidemic. Actually crime is in generation-long cycle of decline. Today, strollers are safer in Central Park after dark than in the 1950s. Last year, Central Park averaged slightly more than one robbery a month, versus two robberies a day a generation ago. Yet on procedurals, crime is getting worse. This plays to preconceived notions about the nation falling apart, especially such notions held by senior citizens, who watch a lot of television.And on procedurals, the police always catch the bad guy. Actually a significant number of homicides are never solved, while most burglaries never even lead to an arrest. Of course, procedurals are just Hollywood nonsense. But procedurals get it wrong both ways: making crime seem more common than it is, but also making crime seem never to pay.

Lots of good material here.

One might say that this doesn’t matter, people clearly know what is entertainment on television and they don’t mistake police shows for what actually happens. But I would argue that this is not the case: most people’s knowledge about police work and crime likely comes from the mass media, particularly depictions on television and in movies. Crime rates are going down yet one wouldn’t know it from its rising popularity on TV. Serial killers are uncommon except on television. Children are rarely abducted except on television. These shows and movies aim to trigger emotional reactions (as TMQ notes, the grisliness of the crimes is often shocking) and fearful responses.

A silly and yet illustrative example from my own life: where I hear news that someone was killed during the day, I have a hard time reconciling this with media images I’ve seen for years that murders tend to take place in stormy situations. While the storms in shows and movies might be more metaphorical than anything else, I have this idea in my head that this is when killing happens. I would guess there is not much data to back this up but this is an idea that has stuck with me even though it was never clearly expressed to me. Violent crime = bad weather.

If we expect citizens to be able to discuss and vote intelligently about important topics like crime and punishment (and have no doubt, we like to punish people), how can this happen if television is painting a heavily slanted story? I wouldn’t suggest that television needs to be completely realistic but at the same time, common images have a cultural power that is difficult to counteract.

Argument: “The SportsCenter-ization of Politics”

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This is a fascinating claim: political journalism today has adopted the genre of sports reporting/entertainment from ESPN. It all comes down to the entertainment of an emotional argument and who is “winning.”

Did this sharing of genres simply come about because ESPN has been successful? Or have ESPN staffers made a name with sports and then branched out into other areas?

Sociologist talks about the downside of choosing your own news

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A sociologist suggests you may be missing something by only choosing what news you want to read:

It’s in no sense odd to find American academe wrangling over journalism. Dean Starkman of the Columbia Journalism Review and Clay Shirky of New York University have recently been hammering away at each other, seeking to determine whether investigative journalism can only be conducted by highly resourced news machines (like the Guardian’s) or by a more individual, digital-first approach (like… um… the Guardian’s). But what’s sociology got to contribute here?

Plenty, Klinenberg says, outlining the fundamental bargain that underpins newspaper life. You, the reader, want crosswords and cartoons, recipes and TV programme guides. You want all the stuff that journalists serve up with a sigh (because, well, it’s not exactly journalism, is it?). And, in return, as part of the deal, journalism is allowed to have a civic purpose – to report and analyse the workings and frailties of democracy – beyond quick ways to whip up a cottage pie.

That bargain, sealed in print, means you can’t have one without the other. Put your cash on the newsagent’s counter and you get some things you desire and other things, from Cardiff or Chad, that you didn’t know had happened until you turned to page five.

Of course, like any other neat thesis, there are readers and editors who don’t quite fit. But the nature of print – flipping from column to column, noticing stories that intrigue you, naturally expanding your spheres of interest – isn’t “versioning” at all – it’s more eclectic. An iPad or Kindle version works within narrower bounds. A Facebook version is even more selective, tailored to your most immediate demands. And the logical version at the end of this line is utterly simple: no deals, no bargains – just what you want, electronically provided on the basis of past predilection.

This is part of a larger question about the consequences of people only being exposed to certain points of view. Only selecting news that we want to read can be self-reinforcing as then we only seek out certain kinds of stories, limiting our view of the world.

I wonder, though, about blaming this issue on the medium. How much does having a newspaper in hand really increase the odds that someone will read something that didn’t plan to? Can’t people simply pick out parts of the newspaper that they want to read as well? Further, was there ever really a “golden age” where average citizens always tried to engage with alternative points of view? I would guess not though that doesn’t mean it isn’t a worthwhile ideal. We need citizens (and journalists) who can understand our complex world which transcends simply “left” or “right” understandings. Perhaps the Internet makes this easier in some ways but I would guess the Internet could be changed to meet these challenges or people’s behaviors could be altered.

This reminds of an argument I was reading last night. People could argue, rightly, that all media viewpoints are biased in some way. However, this doesn’t mean that we can just throw out all news sources and say they don’t have something of value. What should be consistent across different sources are facts and then there can be disagreement about the interpretation of these facts. Of course, what is considered “fact” may be up for grabs as well – see the recent debate over Politifact’s “Lie of the Year.”