Where survey stories come from
The ‘flack:hack’ ratio, the ratio of PR professionals to journalists, has been steadily increasing over time. This graph, from the Economist, shows that the ratio in the US has now reached 9:1.
As Felix Salmon says
for every professional journalist, there are nine people, some of them extremely well paid, trying to persuade that journalist to publish something about a certain company. That wouldn’t be the case if those articles weren’t worth serious money to the companies in question.
This explains a lot of ‘survey’ stories. A no-frills 1000-person survey is not only cheaper than a half-page news-section ad in the Herald, if it gets a story it’s a lot more effective. A story will be syndicated to the regional papers, it will be on the online site for ever, and we’re much more likely to read and trust it.
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »