What stories are hidden in your data?
Boston-based InCrowd offers real-time physician market research. In 2016, they conducted two surveys of emergency room and primary care doctors on the topic of burnout. More than 500 responded to the multiple choice and essay-style questions. The latter yielded a wide range of replies, many of them deeply emotional, and InCrowd asked me to craft a narrative to accompany the charts and graphs.
I started by reading through the Excel spreadsheets containing all responses, weeding out the least useful, one- and two-word replies. I then read through the remaining replies several times, organizing them according to recurring themes (such as frustration with insurance companies and time-consuming electronic records systems, and pressure from health systems to see more and more patients per day). These themes provided a basic structure for the report, which InCrowd turned into a 15-page downloadable white paper that both explained the findings and demonstrated the company’s capabilities.
What powerful stories are lurking in the data you possess or can access?
Accuracy matters in content marketing for the same reason it matters in journalism: Credibility is everything.
While working on articles for an IT client a few years ago, and I came across a staggering claim: 60 percent of small businesses that suffer a cyberattack close within the next six months. Wow, I thought, this could be an article by itself (my client specialized in serving small to mid-sized businesses).
So I went looking for the source. A Google search turned up dozens of mentions of the statistic, but few with any attribution. Some cited the National Cyber Security Alliance, so I used that to cross-reference, and discovered that in 2017, the NCSA had disavowed the claim: The org had once included the stat in an infographic, but it “was not generated from NCSA research, and we cannot verify its original source.”
In 2019, a reporter for SmallBizDaily wrote about the mysterious stat’s long journey, “bouncing from one website to another without anyone bothering to check where it came from.”
And some writers still aren’t checking, because it’s still making the rounds — including, hilariously, in this report on “myths” about small businesses and cybersecurity, where it’s stated as fact.
Another time, while researching an article on childhood development, I came across this claim: The amount of roughhousing children engage in predicts their achievement in first grade better than their kindergarten test scores. Fascinating, right? But like with the cyberattack anecdote, the claim was repeated on lots of web sites, sometimes attributed (in this case, to a professor), but with no other context.
I found the professor and emailed him. His response: “This is NOT accurate! Don’t quote me!” He quickly emailed twice more to make sure I’d seen his reply.
The writers who unwittingly repeated these (at best) misleading claims could have avoided the error with a little more research. Content writers without a background in journalism may not appreciate the importance of checking facts, even the ones that don’t seem to need checking. Or they might be pressed for time. A friend told me recently that his previous employer, a major player in its field, expected its content writers to crank out a 1,500-word reported piece every day. In those conditions, a lot of falsehoods can make it to the page.
Accuracy matters. Mistakes, especially easily avoided ones, damage your credibility. And if your content isn’t credible, it’s not only worthless to readers, it’s harmful to your brand.
“They” won, but that’s no excuse for ignoring grammar altogether
When the San Francisco Examiner opted to accept “they” and “their” as singular pronouns, Editor Michael Howerton explained the decision in terms of respect:
San Francisco Examiner reporters are now adding another question to the basic details we ask of people we talk with: their preferred pronoun. Whether someone wishes to be known as “he,” “she” or “they,” it will be up to us to ask them, not for the reporter to assume.
This is a small change in our daily routine as reporters, but the significance is immense. It will allow our coverage to better reflect the breadth of gender expression and gender identity and present that diversity with a deserved dignity.
Baltimore Sun copyeditor John McIntyre defends the use of singular they in one of his videos on writing.
The Washington Post’s copy editor Bill Walsh made a similar announcement in 2015: “What finally pushed me from acceptance to action on gender-neutral pronouns was the increasing visibility of gender-neutral people. … [S]imply allowing they for a gender-nonconforming person is a no-brainer.”
That was also the official reason for the American Dialect Society’s choosing “they” as the 2015 Word of the Year: “for its emerging use as a pronoun to refer to a known person, often as a conscious choice by a person rejecting the traditional gender binary of he and she.”
But I don’t think awareness is the only reason for the shift. Consider the case of Curt Schilling, who ironically (and probably unwittingly) used inclusive language in the transphobic Facebook comment that got him fired from ESPN: “A man is a man no matter what they call themselves. I don’t care what they are, who they sleep with, men’s room was designed for the penis, women’s not so much.”
Common use of singular they predates Caitlyn Jenner and the show Transparent by many years. Widespread acceptance of this change is probably one part growing awareness of gender identity issues (a good thing), and two parts disregard for agreement in sentences (very, very bad).