If It's E, It Leads | Peer to Peer Review
Ripping the headlines and excavating some buried ledes Barbara Fister, Gustavus Adolphus College, St. Peter, MN Sep 22, 2011 |
| Photo by Debora Miller |
My father wrote the book on news editing-literally. He started his journalism career at a small town weekly in North Dakota, where he got a job as a printer's devil at age 12, becoming a reporter, editor, and salesman before he left for college. After J-school he worked in the newsroom of the Providence Journal before a detour into the army. Eventually, he returned to school, this time to teach several generations of journalists. News Editing, a textbook he wrote that helped feed and clothe his five kids, was born the year before I was and went through two more editions. He decided not to publish a fourth edition because newsrooms were changing too fast-and because he'd grown disgusted with the soaring cost of permission payments required to give students examples of poorly-written headlines and buried ledes.
His decision to stop with the third edition, of course, never prevented my parents from verbally correcting Walter Cronkite's grammar or Huntley and Brinkley's word choice, and they both pounced gleefully on every typo or mangled sentence in the morning paper. News editing was a family sport.
Give me rewrite
Maybe that's why I find myself tempted to put on a green eyeshade and take a red pencil to news stories about ebooks. Take, for example, this breathless lede from a news release that I encountered in yesterday's Shelf Awareness: "The number of Americans using an e book reader has almost doubled during the last 12 months, according to a new survey." That's pretty impressive. It goes on to say "the Harris Poll also revealed one in six Americans who do not have an e-reader intend to buy one during the next six months." Print is doomed! The e-future is here! But hang on a minute while I look at the actual figures.
Oh.
The Fister News Service would report: "a Harris Poll has just revealed the vast majority of Americans-a whopping 85 percent-do not own e-readers, and five of six Americans who don't own an e-reader today do not plan to buy one anytime soon." But that would be boring.
All the news that fits
Still, I would query the wisdom of wasting a column inch pointing out that the percentage of people who buy book reading devices but don't buy books (6%) is smaller than the percentage of people who have bought neither a book reading device nor a book (32%). It's hardly surprising that people who buy reading devices are also likely to buy things to read. It is intriguing that six percent of people with reading devices haven't bought any books, but hey, maybe they're using the library.
On the other hand, the survey reports that 68% of Americans bought at least one book in the past year. Now, that's interesting, considering how often we're told Americans don't read. But good news is no news.
In the "you call this news?" category, I offer this factoid from another report on the Harris survey: "eReader owners bought considerably more eBooks than the general population." Yes, I realize you can download these suckers without owning a device, but if you spring for gadget designed expressly for buying and reading books-do I need to point out the obvious? Even the blogger recapping the news release had the good grace to write "I'm not completely sure why this qualifies as news."
Let's do the numbers
Here's another bit of peculiar reportage from the third annual Aptara eBook Survey of Publishers: "One out of five eBook publishers generates more than 10% of their sales from eBooks." So, a small minority of publishers are making a small percentage of their sales . . . okaaay. The real news here buried in this report is that ebook sales are such a small slice of the sales pie. My lede would be "though publishers of all kinds are making their titles available in digital format, four out of five publishers still make 90 percent or more of their sales from print. Well over half of publishers surveyed reported that their ebook sales accounted for three percent or less of sales." Thought, to be honest, this doesn't tell us much, since most of the publishers who responded to the survey are very small. When your numbers are small, percentages are hugely misleading.
In Damned Lies and Statistics, a charming and accessible book, Joel Best discusses how we use (and misuse) social statistics. Some statistics are born bad. Others are "mutant statistics"-accurate numbers that become garbled as they are passed along. Bad and mutant numbers tend to live on long after they were originally created. Numbers are powerful because they seem more factual than words, more unassailable, and so are effective when used to seek attention or persuade. Understanding the uses and misuses of numbers is a piece of information literacy that often gets neglected because we don't have time to delve into it, but it's something librarians should bear in mind as we read the latest news on ebooks.
And perhaps someday we'll all agree on what to call them: ebooks? eBooks? E-books? My inner news editor wants to know.
| Author Information |
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Barbara Fister is a librarian at Gustavus Adolphus College, St. Peter, MN, a contributor to ACRLog, and an author of crime fiction. Her latest mystery, Through the Cracks (see review), was published last year by Minotaur Books. |
