BlogU

  • Sign of the Times

    By Scott McLemee December 30, 2008 10:53 am

    Some of my in-laws live in the LA area, and they all agree that, however good The Los Angeles Times may once have been, it has of late declined. Actually they use more colorful language than that.

    I don't read that Times very often, but have just seen its quick-hit item on MLA this morning. It opens like so: "More than 10,000 literature scholars are in San Francisco for the 124th annual Modern Language Association (MLA) convention."

    This is shocking news! Attendance last year was about 8900. Mark Aurigemma, one of the helpful souls in the MLA press office, tells me that this year registration was down by four percent, to 8544.

    That can only mean one thing: The LA Times has discovered that this year almost 1500 professors crashed the convention without registering.

    Because otherwise you'd have to assume the reporter was just, you know, guessing.

Go to comments (3) »
Advertisement
On the Job Market Together?

Comments on Sign of the Times

  • Posted by mkgold on December 30, 2008 at 11:50am EST

  • In the Times' defense, another reporter from the Education section of the paper visited several sessions on digital topics such as Microblogging. He spoke to several participants afterwards, and it sounded as if a more comprehensive article was on the way. I'm curious to see whether or not that article will come to fruition (or print).

  • Journalist at MLA
  • Posted by Administrator on December 30, 2008 at 9:55pm EST

  • The journalist didn't guess. Journalists, being aspiring authors, are more interested impact than in math. This one just rounded up because it's much more interesting than 8544.

  • Posted by Scott McLemee on December 31, 2008 at 10:25am EST

  • You could not be more mistaken, Administrator. In reporting, the effort to get the facts right is not a dispensable option.

    Of course this does not always happen -- any more than the citations in a footnote are always accurate. But it is normative.

Print
© Copyright 2009 Inside Higher Ed