Here is today’s media lesson. Get out your pencils.
The Dallas Morning News today published a story headlined “How Far Can a $100K Salary Stretch? Maybe Not So Far If You Live in Southlake, Survey Says.” When you go googling, you’ll find an even click-ier headline: “Why Affluent Cities Southlake, Bellaire Seem Undesirable.” The second and third paragraphs of the story read as follows:
“The perks of a six-figure salary vary depending on purchasing power, or the ability to buy things, according to deals discovery website [name redacted]. For example, inexpensive [sic] cities such as San Francisco and New York City, a lot of income goes toward paying rent and affording other basic necessities.
“To figure out what cities appeal to people, the real-time coupon site surveyed 3,000 respondents and presented them with this hypothetical: which of America’s 150 most expensive cities would you least like to live in, if earning a salary of $100,000?”
It’s hard to know where to start. I guess, first off, who felt the need to define “purchasing power” as “the ability to buy things,” and why didn’t that person simply use the phrase “cost of living”?
But more important: why the heck is the paper writing a story about this? Some coupon website asked people where they’d least like to live if they were making $100k. That doesn’t mean those cities are undesirable. In fact, it probably means the opposite. Expensive cities are expensive because there is a high demand for living in them. Fort Wayne, Indiana, is cheap as hell. That’s because no one wants to live in Fort Wayne—including the people who live in Fort Wayne. (Don’t @ me, Fort Wayne!)
Also, I thought this News story was going to tell me how far $100k stretches in Southlake. What happened to that promise?
Enough questions. Here are some answers: websites are always blasting out crap like this. “The Top Cities for Cheating Spouses Who Own Cats!” And so on. The methodology, if it’s ever explained, is unsound (to put it charitably). These surveys and rankings are really just ads for the websites that produce them, which is why I redacted the name of the site in question. Let’s call it CouponBooger.
In a conference room at CouponBooger, someone recently pointed at figures on a whiteboard and said, “How can we get more traffic to CouponBooger?” And then someone else said, “What if we ranked the top 150 cities based on their usage of coupons?” And then the first person said, “Ick. No one cares about coupons. What if we ranked the most expensive cities based on where people don’t want to live?” And then another someone else said, “What if we stipulated that the survey respondents hypothetically earned $100,000?” And then they all said together, “That’s meaningless! It’s perfect!”
The News then pretends this is actually news and spreads around this CouponBooger ad at no expense to CouponBooger. The paper does this out of desperation and at significant expense to itself. The paper employs something it calls a “trending reporter.” (Not to be confused with a trendy reporter.) According to this News job posting, “Trending reporters provide a range of deadline reporting that reflects the trending topics of the day that could be local, regional, or national.” So you’ve got someone a couple years out of school. You tell her, “Keep your eye on social media. If you see something trending, I need you to write about it. If people are clicking on those trending topics, then let’s get some of those clicks over here at the Rock of Truth. And while you’re at it, make sure everyone knows that purchasing power means the ability to buy things.”
Thus ends today’s lesson. And, yes, this will be on the test.
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