Newspaper Readership Survey

There's a lot of doom and gloom about the future of newspapers in English-speaking media. With that in mind, there's some interesting tidbits from a recurring survey on media consumption in Japan - read the Mainichi Shimbun or Yahoo news summaries unless you want to wade through 60 pages of survey data¹. The Asahi Shimbun summary is shorter, but they deserve applause for actually giving the URL to the report itself right at the top².

Short take: 91% of those surveyed read the newspaper, and they read it an average of 5.2 days per week. This has not changed significantly since the last survey, and is down less than 3 percentage points since 2001.

Internet use is up about 30% since 2001, all other media is slightly down. The losers are mostly weeklies and radio, though both have flattened out or improved slightly lately. The internet is not simply eating the market share of other media; instead overall media use is increasing.

There's lots and lots of detail in the survey itself: For instance, the subgroup that uses newspapers and the internet as their primary sources are an average of 45 years old and have the highest income of all subgroups; newspaper readers are more interested others in society and environment, TV-viewers are more interested in trends while internet users are more interested in information gathering. There's lots and lots of stuff on advertising, reading patterns and so on, usually with pretty graphs so there's no need to wade through lots of tables of anything.

For me, I used to read the newspaper and watch TV a lot up until I became a graduate student and the web exploded (I was a bit jealous of friends making serious money while I was toiling away at the university³). A lack of time and the flood of online info meant I largely stopped used other media, and when I graduated I had neither a TV nor a newspaper subscription any more. Then I came to Japan and didn't know a word of the language, so neither TV nor newspapers were even possible for me to enjoy. I did however read a number of newspapers - Swedish, European American and English-edition Japanese - online.

Nowadays, while i still don't watch much TV (the occasional murder mystery or documentary excepted), I'm sort of returning to the newspaper again. I usually bring last nights evening edition on the morning train, and I occasionally browse the paper on the weekend too. I like the broadsheet format and the variety of stuff. For me, the ideal subscription format would be if I could get the newspaper on paper, along with full access to the entire paper online through both my computer and phone. Maybe someday soon.

--

#1 I am very happy that the survey is available online, even if I didn't intend to go through it; it's reassuring that I can do so if I want to. That said, it's a fairly easy read if you want to take a look. Note that the publisher is a newspaper association, so the whole thing is pretty newspaper-centric, and the usual caveats apply about considering the source.

#2 This is much too rare in online media for some reason, and that they did makes me feel all warm and fuzzy with happiness inside. It almost makes me send them flowers for that, but they'll just have to settle for us renewing our subscription instead. Now, if they could make it an actual live link I would probably have body parts bursting with delight here.

#3 Of course, "toiling away" meant sauntering to work sometime before noon, then spend your
day with fun people, learning all you can about things you find intensely fascinating. I'm not feeling sorry for myself.

No More Elephants

Book Done

I recently finished "Elephant Time, Mouse Time" that I started last year. Took a little longer to read than I thought. Unlike fiction, you want to read popular nonfiction fairly closely so you don't miss anything, and there's plenty of specialty words even in a very accessible book like this. Not sure when I'll have use of words like "echinoderm" (it's 棘皮動物 for those who want to know) but I'm sure it'll come in handy.

So what's next? For now, nothing. Instead I'm trying to read the newspaper. I select one article from the previous evening paper and read it during my commute in the morning. One article may not sound like much - and the first read-through is fairly quick - but with the heavy kanji use and subject-specific vocabulary the second reading is usually slow going. And if I ever finish a piece before I arrive I have a whole paper worth of other articles to choose from.

So far it does seem to improve my vocabulary more than reading a book. Not surprising, as a book is all about one thing throughout while articles are about wildly different subjects. On the downside, a newspaper is a bit large and bulky to wield in a cramped commuter train. We'll see how it goes.

API invokes Godwin's Law

The EU foreign correspondents in Brussels has come up with an interesting notion: Open government and free information access leads to despotism. Yes, we're in "1984" land, apparently, where war is peace, freedom is slavery and openness is repression. You think I'm joking? Here's a quote from the article:

"This is a totalitarian dream," [Mr. Consoli of the API] told EUobserver. "Every dictator who has ever lived has dreamed of communicating directly with the public without questions from a troublesome press."

They seem to believe their own readers are so utterly stupid, so dull, so dumb, so completely bereft of anything resembling analytical thought that they can not see a press release for what it is, and can not be trusted to form an actual informed opinion on their own. Some in the EU press corps wanted to restrict access to press releases only to accredited journalists, forcing all information flow to go through them only; instead they are calling for a mandatory embargo, giving them information ahead of everyone else.

What a heaping pile of dung.

The real reason for this over the top reaction has nothing to do with freedom of information, but with the shrinking number of EU correspondents. They want a monopoly on EU information in order to safeguard their own jobs. Why are their numbers decreasing? After all, if the press corps are doing a lot of valuable legwork and analysis, why would their editors ax their jobs? Partly it's the recession of course. But part of the answer may come from a Australian study showing more than half of all news reports are based on PR - on press releases, prepared media packets and so on.

Of course, taking a press release as a starting point for investigating a piece is fine. But basing your work entirely on competing press material from different interests is not. And that, unfortunately, happens far too often. So perhaps one reason the EU press corps is shrinking is that too many of those people never did enough of that independent reporting and legwork they keep talking about, and instead just repackaged the press material in their own words. When a cash-strapped editor realizes he can get the same material right over the web he'd have a hard time to motivate keeping an expensive foreign correspondent around.

Do I believe journalists in general are lazy or unskilled? No, of course not. Nor do I believe that journalism isn't important, or that it can be completely replaced by hobbyists writing blogs. But while journalists in the abstract do work that is both important and professional, the work done by specific journalists is all too frequently neither. I like newspapers - we take two at home - and I really want to continue liking them. But they're really making it difficult, with distasteful self-serving propaganda like this.

The way for quality journalism to survive is to produce journalism of good enough quality that people want access to it. But this attempt to scare people with a coming dictatorship unless you get privileged access or first dibs on evaluating information is not quality journalism or professional conduct. In fact, this transparent attempt at intimidation smells of exactly the same kind of partisan gutter journalism that is putting me off the paid-for media to begin with.

Smoke Detector Stats

Busy, busy, but I have to take up an obvious piece of faulty reasoning here. An opinionator in the Swedish daily paper Dagens Nyheter by the name of Malin Siwe has a short piece arguing against excessive safety regulations. It's not really unusually bad; indeed, that's my problem with it. This is rather typical for newspaper opinion pieces, in fact.

She is trying to make a perfectly good point: when safety rules become too numerous and too detailed, people end up trying to comply with the rules rather than actually improving safety. The problem with the piece is that her main example is an argument in favour of more rules, not against it. And her lack of statistical understanding means she is completely oblivious to that fact. Here's the relevant passages (roughly translated, emphases mine):

All apartment buildings built since 1999 must have smoke detectors. Many local governments rule that all homes must have them installed. Nine out of ten households have such smoke detectors today.

...

Most cases [of deadly home fires] lacked a smoke detector, but they were there in a large minority of cases - and some worked.

She's arguing that smoke detectors don't help, and that a law mandating them everywhere wouldn't do any good. But she is innumerate enough that her example is actually arguing against her position. Now, can anybody spot the problem above? The information in bold is enough to figure it out.

90% of homes have smoke detectors and 10% do not. Now, if smoke detectors really were useless, then 90% of the fatal fires would also happen in smoke detector-equipped homes while 10% would happen in detector-less ones. But they don't. As she says, a "large minority" of fatal cases happened when a smoke detector was present. Even with a generous interpretation of "large minority", less than half of fatal fires happened when there was a smoke detector in the home.

Let's be very generous, in fact, and say that half - 50% - of fatal fires happened in homes with smoke detectors. In that case, you're nine times less likely to die if you have a smoke detector than if you don't. If "large minority had smoke detectors" actually is something like a third then the number is closer to 20 times. That, to me, is some very persuasive data in favour of mandating smoke detectors.

I don't have a background in statistics¹. I suck at this kind of reasoning, so I always need to draw a figure or two to really understand what is going on. Just to make it clear, take a look at the figures below:

The total area of the rectangle above is all the homes, smoke detector or not. The blue part - 90% - is the homes with a smoke detector. The small orange part at 10% are the homes without. We want to figure out how much more likely you are to have a fatal fire if you're in a home without a smoke detector.

Now we add the fires; that's the small rectangle straddling the two home areas. We don't know how many fires there are compared to the overall number of homes, but it doesn't matter. We're only interested in the difference in risk between smoke detector and detector-less homes.

We were generous above, and said that half the fires where in homes with smoke detectors. So half of the "fire" area is on the "smoke detector" side, and half on the "no detector" side. Again, the size of the "fire" area depends on how many fires there are, but the proportions don't change.

Now, note that the "fire"-part is a much bigger part of the "no detector" area than it is of the "smoke detector" area. That is the point - a much larger proportion of no-detector homes will have a fire than the proportion of smoke detector ones. You're much more likely to have a fatal fire without a smoke detector than when you do.

Let's make it clearer still: Here's the "no detector" area at the top, and the "smoke detector" area at the bottom. We've scaled them so we can compare them directly. Again, the "fire" area - the risk of having a fatal fire - is much larger for the detector-less homes than for those with a detector.

How large the risk is depends on the total number of homes and the number of fatal fires. But the difference in risk depends only on the proportion of smoke detectors, and the proportion of fires in those homes. With our numbers - 90% of homes have smoke detectors, and have 50% of the fires - it turns out you're nine times more likely to have a fatal fire when you don't have a detector than when you do.

Now, she points out that only some smoke detectors actually work. True enough - but that means a larger proportion of fires should be counted among households without smoke detectors too, and becomes an argument in favour of mandating smoke detectors and periodic checks, rather than against. Even with the most pessimistic estimate of working smoke detectors, you're still a couple of times more likely to avoid a fatal fire when you have one in your home².

For those who can't read Swedish she also has a rather confused line of argument around the total number of fatal fires, but it's so incomplete and specious that the only thing it shows is that she doesn't understand high-school level statistics.

Now, I don't blame her. She's not good with statistics - but then, most people are not. Nobody is good at everything. Where she goes wrong is not in misunderstanding statistics; it's in not asking somebody who does understand it for feedback and help.

This is why I despair over the future of the newspaper. After all, the defining difference between professionally staffed newspapers and bloggers is supposed to be that newspapers have the time, the resources and the know-how to check original sources, ask experts for second opinions, fact-check every word and edit the finished text. This opinion piece could have been sanity-checked in ten minutes by anybody with a basic mathematical background. No need to even go outside; somebody from the newspaper's Accounting or IT department would have enough math background to catch the faulty reasoning.

But it wasn't fact checked. As it is, the columnist has published a blog post an opinion piece arguing against the (otherwise quite reasonable) standpoint it was meant to support. When newspaper opinion and editorials ends up reading like second-rate blog posts, I'd rather just skip the papers and read first-rate posts on the net instead.

#1 To the occasional frustration of my coworkers.

#2 I don't know about you, but given the choice I'd rather not burn to death if I can help it. Fire safety is cheap compared to the consequences.

We have legally required smoke detectors, central fire alarm and sprinkler system throughout the apartment, a fire door in the corridor and an emergency ladder on the balcony. It is tested and checked once a year by a couple of fire-safety inspectors; we even get to activate the ladder and climb onto it if we want so we really know how it works. In addition we've added a small fire extinguisher in the kitchen near the gas stove, and we plan to add another one in the bedroom.

Living right on top of an active fault in an earthquake-prone country tends to focus your mind in these matters.