The Gambling Problem

Apparently, gambling is addictive.

A story discussing gambling amongst students was published this past Friday in the Daily Illini. Overall, the story emphasized that gambling is a problem in our country, especially amongst young people. However, I do not think the numbers add up. There was really only one paragraph that included statistics, but it left a few unanswered questions:

“About 2 percent of the adult population are addicted to gambling, or have a high affinity to become addicted to gambling, Kindt said. The percentage of young people, between the ages of 18 and 26, is even higher, at 4 to 6 percent.”

This information is attributed to a professor at our University. If I was the reporter for this story, I would have looked further into the statistics he provided for the story and followed up with him about any questions I had. Since the professor is at the University, it should have been fairly easy to clarify any questions.

Now perhaps my math is off, but when I looked into these gambling statistics, I was a little confused. What is the adult population in our country? According to the World Fact Book, updated July 2008, there are 101,825,901 men and 102,161,823 women in our country between ages 15-64. Lets say then that the adult population consists of about 150,000,000 if we subtract about 50,000,000 for ages 18-26. So if 2 percent of adults are addicted to gambling, that means 3,000,000 people have an addiction. This figure seems high to me. Three million is an extremely large number of people to have an addiction or high affinity to becoming addicted. However, I am also not well-versed in gambling, so maybe the problem is how this data is presented. I think it would have been beneficial to have quote or attributed information for Kindt stating what exactly qualifies someone as addicted; is it a very serious problem or does it just refer to the amount of people that gamble in general. Also, I would like to know how you can quantify the percent of people that could become addicted to gambling. I think it would be hard to measure mathematically and would be clearer with further explanation. In fact, if it is possible to separate the number of people that are actually addicted to gambling and those that could become addicted into two separate percents the data would also be stronger.

The next statistic states that 4 to 6 percent of younger people, ages 18-26, are addicted to gambling. Going back to the math I did from the World Fact Book information, this means that there are roughly 50,000,000 people between ages 18-26. This means that according to this data, it is possible that the same number of people in the total population is equal to the number of younger people that are addicted to gambling: between two and three million. Again, perhaps I am wrong, but this also seems rather high, depending on the definition of addicted.

Copyediting: Because Language Matters

So I am sitting at Grainger and just finished reading the latest chapter of “When Words Collide” and thought now was a good time to blog. For some reason the creative spirit has not come over me so I decided to simply Google “Copy editors.” I have been Googling random terms since our lab session last week since we discussed the importance of Googling ourselves before job interviews.

I was not expecting much when I entered “Copy editors,” but to my surprise I found a very humorous hit. The piece started out by defining what a copy editor does:

“Your job title may or may not be ‘copyeditor,’ but copyediting is what you do: it’s your job to make sure that the documents and publications you work on are clear and accurate--that no errors of fact, grammar, punctuation, or style get in the way of the intended message.”

Copyediting newsletter link

This special, inspirational message to all the copy editors out there comes from a newsletter for copy editors! Maybe this is only funny to me because I have been sitting at Grainger for about three hours now, but come on. I just find it hysterical that there is a newsletter titled “Copyediting” that has been around “since 1990” for all those nerds like us out there who want the hot gossip about copyediting. You have to subscribe to this newsletter!

Besides offering people juicy copy editing tips, “Copyediting” also offers those who are interested in being certified in copyediting a self-paced training program to actually get certified. Although you have to pay for online modules, I can only imagine that the experience is priceless.

McMurray, the company that produces this magical newsletter, gets two thumbs up from me. Not only has it made me laugh out loud at Grainger and given me the energy to keep studying, but it also dotes on the importance of the copy editor. To all of those out there who believe we are destroying the English language and there is no hope in saving it, subscribe to “Copyediting.” At least some people still care and are trying to save our language, or at least having been trying since 1990.

Laura

The Bandwagon to India

At Mindworks Global Media in Noida, India, the work just keeps on coming. The company, started by Tony Joseph, 46, does not produce any type of publication itself, but instead works for media companies from all across the globe that outsource copy editing work.

In a BusinessWeek article from this July, I read that Mindworks has been doing outsourcing work for four years now. Mindworks started outsourcing copy editing work for the U.S. just last year. Joseph said that he realized that the fastest way for Mindworks to grow was to focus on receiving copy editing work from international companies.

Apparently Dell is not the only American company jumping on the bandwagon to India.

Yes, we all know that the newspaper industry is suffering. But outsourcing work to India just to save a buck? It’s hard for me to believe that leaders in the newspaper industry have not thought that although outsourcing saves money they don't have, in the end they are only further hurting themselves. One of the main problems that newspapers and journalism in general are facing at this point in time is a lack of credibility. The rush to be first in publication has allowed for more grammatical and factual errors that tarnish a publication’s reputation. How can outsourcing work to India help solve any of these problems?

As John McIntyre discussed in Back Talk, of course anyone can catch simple spelling errors, but that does not nearly cover the job that copy editors perform. They catch factual errors and mistakes in the English language that one of the 90 men and women at Mindworks would most likely blow over.

Besides the alarming fact that newspapers seem to be missing why outsourcing is not the solution to their problems, I am more upset about the view of America that is being projected to the international community. We are already known as the fat, lazy, stupid country. Which, to be honest, I understand, considering the image that we project to the world through our media and political decisions. But at least before, American’s were editing these stupid shows. Now, not only are we projecting a negative image, but in addition are admitting that we can not even edit this negative image anymore. I get a bad taste in my mouth when I think about the fact that the people who have chosen to pursue journalism and hopefully defend the demise of the English language have given up and passed the job onto people on the other side of the world.

It is one thing for Dell to outsource to India. I can come to terms with the fact that Americans may not be the leaders in computer science and engineering. The other day in my History of Journalism class, my professor reassured us that although our engineering friends on campus will be making three or four times the amount of money we will in a few years, we are not to worry because without communications, there would be no engineers. No matter how many numbers they can crunch, engineers still need to be able to communicate their findings and ideas with one another to make things come together.

The fact that this proud standard that I now hold myself to seems to be slipping away is hard for me to grasp. Are we passing on our pride in communications by passing on our editing responsibilities to India? Have we lost to the engineers?

Headlines gone wrong

Forgive me because I know this topic is a few weeks out dated, but I could not help but stumble across the first post of Professor McDonald’s blog about Steve Jobs’ premature obituary. A few weeks ago, the Bloomberg financial newswire published a story stating that Jobs, the Apple CEO, had passed away. Although Job is ill with pancreatic cancer, he has not died.

I could not help but think back to the article that we read last week by Vin Crosbie. Only in a society where there is a growing need to be the first rather than the best would a newswire rush to publish someone’s death. In the second part of Crosbie’s article he discussed that since the creation of the Internet, there is a 24 hour stream of news. Rather than priding themselves on being the best, newspapers have to be the first. In my opinion, I think that this is an even stronger reason for the downfall of newspapers, rather than lack of variety in the material offered. I feel like every time I tell my friends that I am working for the Daily Illini or want to go into journalism, they ask me why I am bothering to try and get a degree in something that I could already be doing.

At least in younger generations, it seems that there has been a loss of trust in the press, and honestly, I sometimes think for good reason. After looking over the Wired Blog Network’s article about the Steve Jobs situation, I got upset with myself for a second. For as long as I have been interested in journalism, I have always focused on content first. If I am a good enough writer, an editor should always be able to fix any grammatical errors easily, right? I should never have to worry about how or when stories are published, right? Well obviously those are both ridiculous ideas. If I had been the writer who wrote the obituary for Steve Jobs, my reputation would have been just as tarnished as the person who made the mistake in publishing the article. Even more importantly, if I know the grammar and master the language I am writing in, the content should all come together.

The Steve Jobs incident has prepared me to take editing and grammar more seriously. I feel like I have put it off for as long as I have been studying journalism, and am finally ready to master it. Hopefully, the process will not be too painful.

Response to Crosbie articles

After reading the first two parts of Vin Crosbie’s “Transforming American Newspapers,” I felt myself sweating a little bit. Seeing as how it is my final year at the University and I am clearly locked in this journalistic career path, I could not help but think to myself that I might have chosen a future that potentially has a dead end. The first part of Crosbie’s piece really hit home when he mentioned the Goldman Sachs equity analyst Peter Appert who talked about covering the deterioration of the newspaper industry: "If I covered only the newspaper industry, first of all I would have been fired a long time ago; secondly, I would have had to kill myself." Not only does this make me feel like my chances of a career in journalism are dying but also that the field is simply not interesting to the public anymore, which to me is even more upsetting. What surprised me most in the first article was that some online editions of newspapers are read even less frequently than the print versions because until I read Crosbie’s piece, I fell into the category of people that believed print journalism was dying because an online option was available. Although the first part of “Transforming American Newspapers” was filled with statistics that helped me understand just how much newspapers were struggling, I found the second article much more intriguing. In my Journ 405 History of Journalism class, we are currently studying Johannes Gutenberg’s invention the printing press since it allowed for what we know today as mass communication. It took people out of the Middle Ages and gave them the opportunity to communicate with their neighbors for the first time without being scared that the nobility would be knocking at their doorstep soon to come and be-head them. It was quite the shock, therefore, to hear from Crosbie how sticking to the technique developed by Gutenberg is what is actually destroying the newspaper industry just after learning about how it lead to communication in the modern world. Despite how highly I regarded Gutenberg and his ground-breaking invention, I still found myself nodding along with Crosbie as I read that the problem with the newspaper industry is that like in Gutenberg’s time, newspapers are still printing an over supply of a product that is the same for everyone. Of course the internet is more popular, people can get the exact news and information they want at the click of a mouse. But then I stopped myself. Although most mainstream newspapers that I have read are very general, there are also many special topic magazines that can be found right next to these papers at the news stand. Why would print circulation go down if people can get the general, important news from the mainstream papers and then just grab a special topics magazine to go along with it? Well as I read along with Crosbie in part two, I thought to myself, well duh. I forgot about the most important part of the internet: It is free. Of course people are not going to pay for a general newspaper subscription and then also a special topics magazine when they can get it all faster and cheaper online. After finding myself agreeing with Crosbie throughout almost his whole second piece, I felt like the article came to a disappointing ending. He ends with his opinion that there is now not a need for completeness and accuracy in journalism: who cares if a story is edited and factually correct and complete if it is not the first piece out there? With the internet up 24 hours a day, it is now a race to be first rather than the best. This left me again feeling grim about the credibility of my future career. Will anyone take me seriously when I say that I am a journalist? Because even though I went to college for four years and have a degree in the field, a man can sit and publish things online at home in his underwear. I also felt like Crosbie left a main question unanswered in this piece: How? OK, I agree with him that he may have uncovered the root of newspapers’ problems, but he does not say how they can actually shift into publishing more specific topics. Perhaps that will be in the third part of “Transforming American Newspapers,” but until he writes it, I think his argument is missing a key piece. Personally, I hope he does write about a cure so in ten years I won’t be blogging from my basement about what my career could have been.