Should newspapers employ a statistical analysis person?

lc, I think it's overbroad to define a journalist's role as a gatekeeper. More like an investigator, synthesizer or explainer. We take the experts' opinions and make them understandable to the average readers who might not have the time, patience or proclivity to do it for themselves. We don't need to be experts, so long as we can understand what the experts are saying. (And that's no small trick.)

 

As ic's own posts demonstrate, the editorial function of journalism is sometimes just that - editorial. However atomized the Information Age seems, systematically cleaning up and putting a world's worth of complex ideas into readable, useable form remains the baseline description of journalism.

 

But journalists, or rather newspaper reporters, WERE the gatekeepers before the Internet. If it didn't land on your doorstep, less likely you knew about it. With the Internet, though, you don't need to rely on Dave van Dyck to tell you about sabermetrics. You could have learned about it years ago on websites such as Baseball Prospectus*.

And I don't think the roles were mutually exclusive. As I said, I agree that if journalists could fill the role you've staked out for them, that'd be valuable. As an empirical matter, though, I'm not sure how well it reflects reality.

* Of course, people had published books on the topics previously, but the marginal cost of accessing new sources of information on the web is much lower, making the knowledge more widely available.

 

I don't think as a conceptual matter we're that far away. As an empirical matter we might be. I'm not arguing journalists shouldn't fill that role. I'm saying the Internet has made it much more difficult to do so because the deficiencies in their expertise are much more easily exposed.

 

Journalists don't need to be experts.

Their value lies in being able to direct interested reader toward the experts.

In a world of infinite instant content, all of it weightless, information needs to be sorted. More than ever, journalists can help make order out of chaos.

 

This all kind of circles back to an earlier thread I started: Can you be well-informed in 2011 just reading the newspaper?

Based on some of the things that this thread alone brings up, I'm leaning toward "no."

Makes you wonder how people ever got along without the availability of information and analysis that we have access to today. It's funny. I probably know 1,000 times more about baseball than I did when I was 19 or 20. But I feel like I know 1,000 times less, because I'm now aware of how much there is to know.

Imagine being a reader who relies solely on the Chicago Tribune print edition for their baseball news. And those readers do exist. In droves, I bet. That article would be your sole knowledge of Theo Epstein's philosophy, and sabermetrics at large.

I don't know how you could reasonably argue that you would be a well-informed Cubs fan.

 

Az raises a good point.

Perhaps an article like van Dyck's needs a, "To learn more about sabermetrics ..." tagline.

 

This sentence depends entirely upon what that reader gets out of baseball.

 

No matter what that reader gets out of baseball, that article was an inadequate conveyance of what sabermetrics are.

 

I'm not sure what you guys are complaining about. I think that story does exactly what it should: It explains a few of the key sabermetric ideals, while also explaining what they are not (the idea is not to draw walks, but to be disciplined) and also explaining that they are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to evaluations. He's got Goldstein saying there's more than this, and he's got Theo saying there's more than this.

I think for a newspaper story, which has to be aimed at a much broader audience than any specialized website, it was fine.

Reminds me of those few times when I had to do a sports story for A1, and I had to totally dumb it down for non-sports readers.

 

In how much detail does an article about a carpenter need to describe his tools?

 

Not a lot, but you shouldn't write an article about a carpenter and say that he uses such tools as a paint brush, a steamroller and a cement trowel.