Not the way Harbourfront is doing, apparently.

It’s designers and contractors who typically move walls around. Dubbeldam’s response is interesting: “We have controlled every single response – or 90% of them, anyway,” she says…. In other words, as I swung those walls and made skyscrapers out of foam blocks, I was playing their game. […]

Those two struggle with the basic problem of how to show architecture. The… most common route has to display records of a project – photographs, plans and section drawings. But such displays don’t always communicate ideas well, and they can’t communicate the experience of being in a place. […]

Here, the grand idea of that project – to create a vessel of transcendent beauty that can encourage all genres of prayer – gets reduced into soundbites. There’s a slideshow of happy users of the space, audio recordings of their words about it, which are interesting but say nothing meaningful about the design. A panel of lovely onyx stone sits in the corner, looking bored.

Oh, yes, and you get to the slideshow by walking down a path of fine gravel and around a rank of leafy plants. Which means… what, exactly?

A veteran like Cringely must surely be aware that E-mail was corrupted not by spam, a problem that is not just solvable but essentially solved for all expert users, but by top-posting, which instantly destroyed E-mail as a medium of communication.

J‑Source is the site operated by the Canadian Journalism Foundation. It is so technically atrocious it does not really have “HTML” and comments on blog posts work only if you manually add www. to the site address (which instruction the site actually gives you). Nonetheless, it is the closest thing to a Romenesko manqué Canada has.

I sent along a note about my gay-money research and received this invitation from interim associate editrix Dana Lacey on 2010.11.24:

I think it would be interesting if you wrote a story for J‑Source outlining the media myths you’ve encountered in your research, and the reasons behind launching this site. Let me know if this is something you’d be interested in.

I told her I’d have to work up a head of steam to do that. I later did, going so far as to call up Tara Perkins and Marina Strauss, the Globe and Mail journos who put together that absurd story on gay wine that prompted my entire project. I turned in copy on 2010.12.03, and Lacey has been incommunicado since that point.

Here, then, is the article J‑Source commissioned, then refused to run.

When facts get in the way of a good-news story

When journalists spend a decade and a half telling a good-news story about a minority group, what happens when facts contradict the story? Is the news still good?

The minority group in question here is “the gay community” – a term whose vagueness will become important later on – and the story is the “lucrative” market the gay community represents. Journalists’ coverage has consistently struck the same notes from the 1990s (“Going after the gay market: Business begins to realize there is profit in aiming ads at affluent, educated gays,” Montreal Gazette, Sept. 27, 1992) to the present day (“Looking for gold at the end of the rainbow,” Globe and Mail, June 26, 2009). It’s a good-news story of “gays” who, because they are “DINKs,” have more disposable income than straight people, making them a “dream” market.

These stories paint a picture of a “demographic” with no kids to pay for. “The gay community” envisaged here has exquisite taste; it expects nothing but the best and is happy to pay for it. The reporting is really about fashion-forward, fabulous gay males, of course, not frumpy lesbians with a fixer-upper they’re renovating with their own tools. Gay entrepreneur and market Sean Strub summed up the stereotype well: “The public sees two gay professional white men with their BMWs and shar-pei dogs, or whatever, and take that to be an accurate reflection of our community.”

One problem: This good-news story isn’t true, at least according to the consensus of economists. By far the majority of peer-reviewed papers reporting data from the U.S., Sweden, Australia, the U.K., and, yes, Canada show that gay males have, on average, lower incomes and earnings than straight males, while lesbians have higher average incomes and earnings than straight females. And lesbians and gay males do have kids – in rough terms, about one-half and one-quarter as often as straight people, respectively.

But this isn’t the story gay marketers tell.

Telling half-truths with “statistics”

Using surveys of, say, attendees at gay-pride events, subscribers to gay newspapers, or tourists at gay hotspots (none of them random samples), marketers have jumped to optimistic conclusions, all of which conveniently correspond to the interests of firms trying to market goods and services to the gay community (or their own services as gay-marketing experts). Canada gets off a bit more lightly in this regard than the United Kingdom, where gay marketing can be and is summed up in a cutesy alliteration – “the pink pound.”

If you were a marketer who lived and died by the data, you’d spend most of your time selling to married heterosexual males, because a well-documented “marriage premium” puts them on top of the earnings heap on average. But married guys aren’t a new market to be exploited, nor are they a hot new topic for journalists to cover.

The facts about gay money have been readily available since about 2001, when M.V. Lee Badgett’s seminal book Money, Myths and Change: The Economic Lives of Lesbians and Gay Men was published. But journalists have remained curiously immune to the facts. Let’s return to that Globe and Mail piece from 2009, for which Marina Strauss and Tara Perkins shared the byline. It proposed an entire new product category – gay wine.

“Gay people have better-than-average taste in wine and they have a lot of disposable income to spend on wines,” says Daniel Lenko, owner of his eponymous winery. “It might look a little bit campy or a little tongue in cheek. But a lot of people are waking up and saying, ‘Hey, these people have been ignored as a potential sale. Let’s get our heads out of the sand and do something about it.’ ”

The efforts can pay off handsomely. According to the Canadian Gay & Lesbian Chamber of Commerce, the GBLT demographic is estimated to have the collective buying power of about $100 billion a year….

There actually aren’t any peer-reviewed studies of gay “buying power” or “disposable income.” (Defining those terms is an issue in itself; StatsCan tersely defines disposable income as “Personal income less current transfers to government.”)

Why do journalists keep writing and rewriting the same good-news story even though the news isn’t all that good? I have a pet theory that I think is not really wide of the mark: Journalists are fundamentally liberal. It appeals to their sensibilities to have good news to report about gay people, a group they generally like and work with day to day.

Viewed more objectively, marketers’ claims are more convenient to cover. A quick rewrite is all you need. It takes much more time to fact-check marketers’ claims; journos are not in a big rush to put in that time if it means – again – contradicting a good-news story.

Sources explain their reasoning

A meta-article about journalism requires its own fact-checking, so I double-checked with sources.

• I called up Perkins and Strauss to ask why they thought journalists keep republishing the same untruths. Perkins couldn’t remember the article (or a conversation she and I had had in June 2009 after the article appeared), but promised to get back to me; despite a follow-up E-mail, she didn’t.

  “I think they look at disposable income especially,” Strauss said, “and the fact that this demographic has more money to spend, more disposable money. They have fewer people who are dependent on them and so they can spend more of the money they make on purchases, which makes it a potentially attractive market for companies.”

  When I pointed out this was a restatement of marketer’s unverified claims, Strauss asked, in an annoyed-sounding voice, why I was bothering her instead of the Chamber of Commerce. (Because journalists are the story, I told her.)

• The Canadian Gay & Lesbian Chamber of Commerce (CGLCC) couldn’t back up the “$100 billion a year” estimate. When asked for corroboration, CLGCC’s Bruce McDonald E-mailed a survey on the gay travel market; not only did the survey fail to mention the figure in question or anything like it, it did not even state its number of respondents. (All of them were, however, recruited online, and – surprise – most earned higher incomes than Canadian average.)

  When queried further, McDonald did not fill in that gap about number of respondents. He did, however, refer me to a report (PDF) from the International Gay & Lesbian Chamber of Commerce (headquartered in Montreal) that included an “Est. G/L Spending Power” for Canada of €68,144,016,000 ($90 billion). Methodology? Here it is in full: “The findings are based on data collected from publicly-accessible information sources, including Web sites, government statistics offices, and the public CIA Global Information Service.”

That’s how much work it took to disprove a single claim in one article. In general, it’s just easier to copy and paste from a press release. Because who can resist a good-news story about that admirable gay community?

Resources for journalists covering gay money and “the gay market”

Inspired in part by the Perkins/Strauss article, I spent more than half of 2010 reading nearly every peer-reviewed study, and many popular-press articles and books, about lesbian and gay incomes and earnings. One of my goals was to produce a readily-Googlable source of reliable information for other journalists so that finally, at long last, they’d stop making the same mistakes.

My resource – Gay Money: The Truth About Lesbian & Gay Economics – is now online, as is a companion chapter for journalists.

Reference

Strub, Sean (1997). “The growth of the gay and lesbian market.” In Martin Duberman, ed., A Queer World: The Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader

Humorist David Sedaris, a man so rich he and his “boyfriend” lived in the south of France, enjoys his book tours more than most celebrity authors. And also unlike his A-list counterparts, Sedaris used to put out a “tip jar” that raked in four grand. Here again, money failed to buy happiness.

A couple of books ago, I put a tip jar on my signing table and I made over $4,000 on my tour. The problem was then I started hating people who didn’t tip me. I didn’t say anything to them, but I would just sit there thinking, “You cheap son of a bitch. I just signed four books and you can’t even give me a dollar?” And why should they? But I just got so involved in it. I had to stop doing it.

I told people it was all for me to spend on candy. They were delighted because it’s funny to give money to someone who doesn’t need it. If there had been a beggar outside the bookstore, at the end of the evening, he might have had 75¢, whereas at the end of my best evening, in Dallas, [I had] $530 in tips.

Mark Norman Francis (or Norm but never Norm Francis), one of (now many) former “Yahoos,” wrote an excoriating sequence of Twits about the company that we used to say is Nº 1 at being Nº 2. Since Twitter’s view of archiving is analogous to Yahoo’s view of Geocities, I am preserving them for posterity here. (Copy-edited; mildly reordered.)

• Yahoo should be ashamed of itself. Instead the press releases will talk of this as a positive and strengthening move.

• Yahoo closing Geocities was the first symptom of illness. Yahoo closing Delicious means it is time for radical therapy before the body dies.

• Yahoo is a company that thinks having pictures up is bad for the decor. Unless they are branded, motivational posters.

• Yahoo is a company that refused to supply a replacement laptop to a developer after one was stolen. After all, code just writes itself.

• Yahoo is a big company. The thing about big companies is that you don’t work for the company, but really only a tiny fiefdom within it.

• Yahoo is a company where the design guidelines are introduced to you with “gleaming purple pride.” And no sense of irony.

• Yahoo is a company that promises a retention bonus in two years. And then makes you redundant after one.

• Yahoo is a company where vending machine coffee being upgraded to vending machine coffee was a reason to remove an actual espresso machine.

• Yahoo is a company where an employee was later bullied by senior management for asking a question in an All Hands. During the Q&A section.

• Yahoo is a company where accessibility bugs on a product were closed WONTFIX because that’s not what they used Bugzilla for.

• Yahoo is a company where the idea of maintaing a product was so onerous that it was better to cancel it. But had to finish it first.

• Yahoo was a company where making a fourth bookmarking service was a good idea. Yahoo is now a company where even one seems like too many.

• Yahoo is a company where knowledge is powerless.

• Yahoo is a company where covering Cannes and the Oscars is a “roadmap” for a Movies website. But the meeting to decide that takes all day.

• Yahoo Europe is a company that won’t hold another Barcamp because it involves letting strangers into the building.

• Yahoo is a company where adding a video player (with no actual video to play) to a page is more important than adding content to the page.

• Yahoo is a company where you get called into a meeting to explain why you are not at your desk working.

• Yahoo is a company that prioritised the Facilities team’s concerns about wall cleanliness over the needs of the people who made Web sites.

• Yahoo is a company where a JPEG in a presentation deck implements “new features” so well that you don’t have to actually bother building it.

• Yahoo has so much potential for greatness wrapped up in its greatest asset – the employees. And is stripping that away in search of profit.

• Being a developer for Yahoo was the best job I ever had. Being a developer for Yahoo was the worst job I ever had.

• Yahoo had the most incredible team of developers in London I have ever known. And has pissed almost all of that talent away.

• Yahoo was a great place to work. In my first two years I shipped about twelve things. In my next two years I shipped one. Then I quit.

• Yahoo Europe believed it was better to wait four years for one new website from the US than to build fifteen in 18 months. Still waiting.

• Yahoo is a company that makes awesome software, open sources it and then forbids you from using it internally. Because “no one uses it.”

• Google holds developer conferences in places like the Moscone Center. Yahoo makes people go to an office next to a sewage treatment plant.

• Yahoo is a company that thinks globally and acts locally. I say locally, I mean Sunnyvaley.

• Yahoo is a company that shuts down projects like Brickhouse so it can focus on innovation. Where innovation means making another homepage.

• Yahoo is a company that would rather waste time building another internal portal “blog” than make search work on the internal wiki.

• Yahoo is a company that treats profitable sites as a burden just because they are not as profitable as the homepage.

• Yahoo is a company that hands out plastic awards for innovating, then buries it and stops the originator from doing anything with it.

• Yahoo is a company that thinks shielding management from alternative ideas is a route to success.

• Yahoo is a company that believes SEO comes first and content comes about seventh. Well, in Europe anyway. I hear the U.S. has content.

• Yahoo is a company that believes that a developer building a site worth $5 million should get less that the salesperson who fills it with ads.

• Yahoo has more than 10,000 people with opinions on what is good and right, and ignores them all in favour of listening to Wall St.

• Yahoo is a company that believes copying what is already overwhelmingly popular is how to get first place. “Fast” following.

• Yahoo is a company that believes in taking six years to write from scratch software inferior to what it already uses. And calls it progress.

• Yahoo is a company that believes Americans with no experience of building Web sites in and for Europe are better at it than Europeans.

• Yahoo is a company that believes cutting people that live and breathe the Internet is how you get better at building Web sites.

• Yahoo is a company that spent more on marketing an “innovation” scheme in Europe than it did on developing any of the ideas generated.

• Yahoo is the company that could and should be the biggest force for good and transformation on the Internet. Instead they target soccer moms.

• Yahoo is the company I most think of as “home.” Which is why I hate to see it going so very, very wrong.

• Yahoo is a company I feel privileged to have worked for. I doubt that it feels the same about me. Or even knows who I am any more.

• Yahoo is a company capable of awesome. There are just too many layers of interference between the web makers and the decision makers.

• Yahoo is the company I left two years and two days ago (15/12/2008). I still miss it terribly. It still makes me angry when they fuck up.

• But most of all, Yahoo used to be the company where the talent went to. Now it’s where they get pushed away from. And that makes me sad.

• Yahoo… will never hire me back after this evening. :)

The complete blackout by the mainstream press, who refused en masse to even mention my work on gay and lesbian incomes and earnings, ended today when Freakonomics covered it.

That kind of makes up for it, I’d say.

I do find it interesting that the established gay press, very much including Xtra, also refuses to cover the story, perhaps because the media kits they use to sell space to advertisers tell a story the actual science contradicts. Over to you, Matt Mills.

G20.

The second Hacks & Hackers event was two days ago (2010.12.14) at Unspace, complete with iPad-wielding concierge, coat racks, and open bar.

Craig Silverman’s chest hair

Presentations began with what amounted to a promotional announcement from an Unspace user – a startup that has developed an overcomplicated, unscalable interface for classifying music by its emotional character. (The use case is music supervisors for movies. A single company’s repertoire of 400 songs – the actual client’s repertoire – may be a drop in the bucket for such supervisors, or may be irrelevant because they pride themselves on instant recall and powers of association cultivated through a lifetime’s music-listening.)

I was not clear on why we were being subjected to a technology demo unrelated to journalism. This would become a pattern. Two of the four presentations (esteemed colleague K-Hug’s MyTTC; Anna SOB’s use of APIs to pull in boxes of related information while you’re trying to watch a video) were better suited to a DemoCamp or moral equivalent. Hacks & Hackers is not another venue to demo random tech projects. (Next up: Fat nerds lecturing us on “FOSS”?)

The other two presentations were journalistic – Dwight Friesen’s on pulling in live results from the 2010 municipal election, and OpenFile’s Poppy project for Remembrance Day. The former represented a new way of reporting the facts, with the goal of giving the (implicitly not-blind) television viewer the results before a CBC newscaster could put them into words. The latter included custom-written biographies of four fallen soldiers, but was otherwise a data-visualization exercise. And I have issues with that.

I reiterate my concern here: If there is any general impression of what hackers can do for hacks, it’s a mental image of a Google map with a bunch of pins on it. In other words, turning databases into nice graphics. Writers don’t know how to do that, which “explains” why they “need” programmers at Hacks & Hackers meetups. (When you get right down to it, implicit throughout this movement is the idea that hacks need hackers.) But I know for a fact this is not all or even most of what Adrian Holovaty had in mind when he pioneered data journalism.

Our purpose in forcing hacks and hackers to mingle is not to find another cute use for Google Maps. It isn’t true that hackers can help out hacks mostly by whipping up some kind of dataviz.

Besides, even in the OpenFile example there was a harmful lack of cartographic literacy or even understanding of scale. Its visualization of Toronto’s war dead (which, incidentally, was nothing but a static image on my iTouch when I checked it during the demo) gives the impression of a city map almost overrun with poppies, a symbol chosen for war dead or their survivors.

We were told this near-contiguous mass of red taught us the unexpected lesson that the city was awash in casualties. The truth is the poppies are massively overscaled for full-city view and, when you zoom in, turn out to be the size of four detached houses.

In fact only a fraction of Toronto’s residences were home to war dead or their survivors, but the out-of-scale bird’s-eye view misleads you into thinking the opposite. (Fixes are easy: Set a tighter default zoom and post a disclaimer.)

If you walk into data journalism thinking your entire job is feeding numbers into the Google Maps API, you’re already missing the point. If you don’t have enough literacy to understand when the picture you generate misleads the viewer, you have failed outright.

What’s in it for writers?

Another of my esteemed colleagues and I debated this at length. Hacks & Hackers Toronto is a nice comfortable playground for programmers who already kind of know each other to talk shop and show off their dataviz. I’m OK with that. But what happens if we put the writers at the centre of the project? What are writers expected to teach hackers? What are hacks expected to learn from hackers?

I have my own ideas in this respect and my esteemed colleague backs me up on them. We need to train writers in basic technical skills. They’re the same skills whose absence I’ve been complaining about for years – and here I am ready to do something about it. I’ve been willing and able to remedy the problem since the first Hacks & Hackers event, but I guess it was just simpler to ask people we already knew to get up in front of an audience and give the kind of technology demo we’re already familiar with.

My esteemed colleague and I plan to offer two back-to-back 20-minute sessions on Unicode: One for writers on what Unicode is, how to avoid errors, and what to do when common errors happen, and a second one for programmers on how to unfuck your internal systems so that errors don’t happen in the first place. We’ll need a room with wifi and seating for everyone. Open bar is rather optional; haven’t we got work to do?

So does Ben Hammersley (op. cit.; ≈7:40 in video [iTunes]):

While we’ve been chasing the “conversation” thing, people have drifted away from news because they’re seeing the conversation as fun and entertaining but not very worthwhile compared to really, really good journalism and really, really good reporting. I think that the emphasis that so many organizations have had over the past few years of concentrating on opinion-sharing has been a massive waste of time and resources – and actually almost a cultural crime, because that time and resources could have been put forth to something that was, you know, much more intellectually rigorous, and would have kept the brand… known for its news, rather than known for… being a collection of mad people.