 Here’s a new reason why good work is sometimes not recognized at awards time.
I received an e-mail last night from Gina Tenorio, the president of the Inland Southern California Professional chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists. Layoffs at Southern California papers have reached the point where the chapter can’t effectively run the contest and they didn’t want to run a contest with an expensive entry fee in light of everyone’s economic outlook this year.
(For the record, I would be happy with foregoing the rubber chicken dinner at the Riverside Marriott and just mailing out the awards, but I can’t argue with the logic otherwise.)
A grim sign of the times.
(Via my friend Nicole.)
Doing the Math to Find the Good Jobs
Nineteen years ago, Jennifer Courter set out on a career path that has since provided her with a steady stream of lucrative, low-stress jobs. Now, her occupation — mathematician — has landed at the top spot on a new study ranking the best and worst jobs in the U.S.
“It’s a lot more than just some boring subject that everybody has to take in school,” says Ms. Courter, a research mathematician at mental images Inc., a maker of 3D-visualization software in San Francisco. “It’s the science of problem-solving.”
The study, to be released Tuesday from CareerCast.com, a new job site, evaluates 200 professions to determine the best and worst according to five criteria inherent to every job: environment, income, employment outlook, physical demands and stress. (CareerCast.com is published by Adicio Inc., in which Wall Street Journal owner News Corp. holds a minority stake.)
The findings were compiled by Les Krantz, author of “Jobs Rated Almanac,” and are based on data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Census Bureau, as well as studies from trade associations and Mr. Krantz’s own expertise.
According to the study, mathematicians fared best in part because they typically work in favorable conditions — indoors and in places free of toxic fumes or noise — unlike those toward the bottom of the list like sewage-plant operator, painter and bricklayer. They also aren’t expected to do any heavy lifting, crawling or crouching — attributes associated with occupations such as firefighter, auto mechanic and plumber.
The study also considers pay, which was determined by measuring each job’s median income and growth potential. Mathematicians’ annual income was pegged at $94,160, but Ms. Courter, 38, says her salary exceeds that amount.
Her job entails working as part of a virtual team that designs mathematically based computer programs, some of which have been used to make films such as “The Matrix” and “Speed Racer.” She telecommutes from her home and rarely works overtime or feels stressed out. “Problem-solving involves a lot of thinking,” says Ms. Courter. “I find that calming.”
Other jobs at the top of the study’s list include actuary, statistician, biologist, software engineer and computer-systems analyst, historian and sociologist.
Enough about you, let’s talk about me.
I graduated college intending to be a Newscaster — “Prepares and delivers news and related presentations over the air on radio and television.” — which comes in at #75.
I entered college intending to be a Disc Jockey, which comes in at #108.
But I’ve made my career as a Reporter (Newspaper), which comes in at #140, one ahead of Janitor.
It looks like a second story of mine is going to get the People Magazine treatment.
The first was the Delgadillo family, who got sort of engulfed in a media wave in early 2007, following my story on them in December 2006. It was compelling stuff, with one child taking care of the rest of her family while both parents were in Iraq, but there were numerous TV shows, People Magazine and who knows what else that came calling, and I suspect they may have gotten a bit overwhelmed with all the attention.
People Magazine called the office Monday, looking for contacts related to another story of mine. People’s year-end issue is doing a special article on fallen heroes, and they want to talk to the family of the late Sgt. James K. Healy about his story. I certainly found his story compelling, and I think he’s a good subject for this sort of piece. Too often, fallen soldiers are forgotten about after a single news cycle, and I think it’s nice when that doesn’t happen.
High school kids want to know about money, and that’s almost it.
Middle school kids want gross stories. If you have seen dead bodies on the job (I’ve seen two), tell them about it.
Elementary school kids want to know about your pets. I’m not sure how my cats and (shockingly) unnamed cats contribute to journalism, but apparently they do.
I was only a year or two older, at most, when my first newspaper article was published in the student newspaper of the American International School in Vienna, than the kids I talked to today. We’ll see if any of the kids I talked to today at Joshua Circle Elementary School end up going into journalism. There’s not banking industry money, but there are dead bodies.
From The Economist:
Bias can be thought of as a supply-side phenomenon that arises from ideology. Owners’ or employees’ political views will determine how a newspaper or channel slants its coverage of a piece of news. But this does not square with the assumption that readers and viewers value accuracy. If so, then competition should hurt media outlets that systematically distort the news (in any direction). The brouhaha about bias in America, as free a media market as any, suggests something else is going on.
The key to understanding why bias flourishes in a competitive market may lie in thinking more clearly about what readers actually want. Sendhil Mullainathan and Andrei Shleifer, two Harvard economists, argued in an influential paper* that it may be naive to think that people care about accuracy alone. Instead, they modelled the consequences of assuming that newspaper readers also like to have their beliefs confirmed by what they read. As long as readers have different beliefs, the Mullainathan-Shleifer model suggests that competition, far from driving biased reporting out of the market, would encourage newspapers to cater to the biases of different segments of the reading public. A more recent paper** by Matthew Gentzkow and Jesse Shapiro, two economists at the University of Chicago’s business school, set out to test this proposition.
To do so, they first needed a way to measure the political slant of American news coverage. Their solution was rather imaginative. The researchers ran computer programs that analysed debates in Congress and identified phrases that were disproportionately used by Republicans or Democrats. The list of frequent Democratic phrases, for example, included “estate tax�. While talking about the same issue, Republicans tended to use the phrase “death tax�. (This is not just coincidence. Mr Gentzkow and Mr Shapiro quote an anonymous Republican staffer as saying that the party machine trained members to say “death tax�, because “‘estate tax’ sounds like it hits only the wealthy but ‘death tax’ sounds like it hits everyone�.) Having identified partisan phrases, the academics then analysed the news coverage of more than 400 American newspapers to see how often they cropped up in reporting. This gave them a precise measure of “slant�, showing the extent to which the news coverage in these papers tended to use politically charged phrases.
Mr Gentzkow and Mr Shapiro then needed to assess the political beliefs of different newspapers’ readerships, which they did using data on the share of votes in each newspaper’s market that went to President Bush in the 2004 presidential elections, and information on how likely people in different parts of that market were to contribute to entities allied to either Democrats or Republicans. The researchers were now able to look at the relationships between circulation, slant, and people’s political views.
First, they measured whether a newspaper’s circulation responded to the match between its slant and its readers’ views. Not surprisingly, they found that more “Republican� newspapers had relatively higher circulations in more “Republican� zip codes. But their calculations of the degree to which circulation responded to political beliefs also allowed them to do something more interesting: to calculate what degree of slant would be most profitable for each newspaper in their sample to adopt, given the political make-up of the market it covered. They compared this profit-maximising slant to their measure of the actual slant of each newspaper’s coverage.
They found a striking congruence between the two. Newspapers tended, on average, to locate themselves neither to the right nor to the left of the level of slant that Mr Gentzkow and Mr Shapiro reckon would maximise their profits. And for good commercial reasons: their model showed that even a minor deviation from this “ideal� level of slant would hurt profits through a sizeable loss of circulation.
This matches my experience, which, I guess, means that it plays to my pre-existing expectations.
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