As keen followers of our Twitter feed may have noticed, the Review added to its trophy case yesterday, taking home eight awards from the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication.

Miro Rodriguez’s story about how citizen video affects coverage of police shootings earned second place in the “Consumer Magzine Article: Feature” category. In the same category, Megan Jones’ feature about journalists’ mental health was recognized with an honourable mention.

Rebecca Melnyk’s feature on the importance of literary journalism after Lac-Mégantic was recognized in two categories, taking second place in both: “Places” and “Investigation and Analysis.”

In the latter category, another Review writer was also recognized: Daniel Sellers, for his first-person look at the growing world of branded content.

Luc Rinaldi’s examination of religious publications—and his own experience with one of them—earned him third place in the “First Person” category.

In the “Specialized Business Press Article” category, Ronan O’Beirne’s take on how journalists cover public-opinion polls took third place.

And, finally, the Spring 2014 issue as a whole took third place for “Single Issue of an Ongoing Print Magazine.” The above articles and all the other excellent work from this year’s masthead can be found here.

For those keeping a tally—not that we ever would—eight is (according to our instructor, Tim Falconer) a record for the Review.

The masthead would like to offer its thanks to the many editors who helped shepherd these pieces to print. And thanks to you, as ever, for reading.

Remember to follow the Review and its masthead on Twitter. Email the 2014 blog editor here.

 By Ronan O’Beirne

There’s a lot that goes on behind the scenes at the Review, and nobody has seen or done more than Lynn Cunningham. A widely respected editor before joining the faculty at Ryerson (she received, among other accolades, the National Magazine Awards’ lifetime achievement award in 1999), Lynn has been a mentor to countless writers and editors over the years. Having rid our pages of dozens of comma splices, Lynn is retiring at the end of the academic year, so we asked friends and alumni to pay tribute to her.

We hope she has more time to write now.

By Ronan O’Beirne

Welcome to the poll on polls. To begin, please press 1

“What is a poll?” David Akin asks in the makeup room at the Sun News Network studio in downtown Toronto. He doesn’t need to think about his answer. “It is a snapshot backward in time.”

This photo of public opinion is a hallmark of Akin’s show, Battleground, which specializes in election coverage. For the final week of the 2013 Nova Scotia provincial campaign, Sun has commissioned a tracking poll from Abacus Data at a total cost of $12,000, devoting daily segments to analyzing the company’s numbers. The network has brought CEO David Coletto to the studio tonight—election night, October 8—to explain the results as they come in.

It’s a big night for Coletto. At 31, he’s a rising star in polling: his final figures in the 2011 federal and Ontario elections matched the actual votes almost perfectly, but Nova Scotia is his first test since a May 2013 provincial election in British Columbia, when his numbers did not match the results. “It’s a nervous night for pollsters—I know it is for you, David,” Akin says during rehearsal. He chuckles; he remembers B.C.

It’s also an important night for journalists. After the B.C. election, they faced harsh criticism from colleagues and comment-section- dwellers for the way they covered public-opinion surveys. All firms’ polls were so inaccurate, in fact, they nearly put Canada’s polling news website, Éric Grenier’s ThreeHundredEight.com, out of business. Like many, Grenier had projected an NDP victory; when the Liberals won, he asked himself, “Why run a site about polling when polling in Canada is so horrid?”

But with the polling industry under fire for poor performance, he thought there was still a place for his work. “In its own tiny little way,” he wrote, “ThreeHundredEight can be part of the solution.” Still, bad information and wonky predictions in Nova Scotia could mean further erosion of public trust in journalists. Akin isn’t nervous, though, because he accepts that the numbers might be off. “Polls aren’t necessarily predictive things,” he says. Snapshots aren’t crystal balls, and polls may or may not tell the future. “The last time we asked Nova Scotians was two days ago. Did they decide to do something different today? Well, they could have.”

He’s about to find out. The polls close in 20 minutes.

Thorough coverage from Battleground and a perfect showing from Abacus would be a good start, but fixing poll reporting will require much more. Over the past two decades, too many Canadian journalists have reduced the science of public opinion to a quick and catchy story at the expense of depth and nuance. Under constant pressure to produce content, they report on statistically insignificant shifts, ignoring margins of error and previous polls. Editors don’t carry out the due diligence that a poll’s numbers and methodology require, and newsroom budgets have less room than before for exhaustive, high-quality surveys, often settling for abbreviated freebies that pollsters use as advertising. A good poll, as Akin says, is a clear portrait of the public’s mood, but the stories these snapshots generate tend to crop and Photoshop the numbers beyond recognition.

This doesn’t necessarily mean journalists should give up trying. Despite lean budgets and tight news cycles, reporters can produce solid poll coverage—but it requires skepticism, scrutiny and resisting the temptation of a quick story with a clickable headline.

If you think the golden age of poll stories is over, please press 2

An unscientific survey of journalists and pollsters suggests that poll reporting wasn’t always bad. On January 19, 1984, The Globe and Mail did it right: a Globe-CROP poll, conducted by Environics Research and Montreal-based research agency CROP, ran on the front page, above the fold. The results were unremarkable: the federal Liberals were gaining on Brian Mulroney’s Tories. But compared to modern poll coverage, it was a 14-megapixel panorama. Apart from the statistical rigour—a sample size twice as big as most polls today—the authors, who also oversaw the poll, thoroughly dissected the results, including an in-depth explanation of the methodology and the exact wording of the questions. A second article, published the same day, explained the difference between the Globe-CROP poll and a recent Gallup survey, and cautioned that polls conducted before election campaigns do not necessarily predict voting results. The page also displayed a table with party-support numbers dating back four years.

This close partnership between newspaper and pollster is a relic of a different time, when more surveys were conducted in person and Canadians actually answered their phones, rather than relying on caller ID to screen out strangers. It was also a time when pollsters went from being geeks to oracles, led by characters like Martin Goldfarb, whom Saturday Night dubbed “the most influential private citizen in Canada,” and Allan Gregg, whose signature long hair and diamond earring earned him the label “the punk pollster.” Journalists loved them: profiling Gregg in Saturday Night in 1985—a year after the magazine had flattered Goldfarb—Robert Fulford called him “the sort of man who makes you want to buy what he’s selling, whatever it is.”

Newspapers and broadcasters bought into Gregg and his ilk. According to Claire Hoy’s 1989 book, Margin of Error, CBC paid $167,000 for polls during the 1988 federal campaign. Other outlets paid up to $70,000, but that was only a fraction of market value (even the Globe-CROP poll covered only the pollsters’ costs). Then, as now, media polling was a small and unprofitable portion of the market researchers’ work—but it was worth it to get a firm’s name on the evening news.

Despite the money and care that went into them, stories based on thorough polls were not immune to criticism. Hoy wrote that polls are “not news in the sense that other campaign activities, such as speeches or announcements, are.” Stories about them are self-generated, created by the journalists, rather than by actual events. He also criticized Environics, whose pollsters had co-written the Globe-CROP stories, for “the same data distortions they have criticized other media outlets for in the past.”

If you are skeptical about Rob Ford’s popularity, please press 3

The man who co-wrote the Globe-CROP poll story in 1984 was Michael Adams, co-founder of Environics. At 67 years old, he doesn’t do much work for news outlets anymore—his new venture, the Environics Institute, works in “social research,” which suits his professorial style and sociology background.

But he hasn’t turned his back on media polls entirely. Today, he’s dissecting a recent Forum Research poll with his executive director, Keith Neuman, in a noisy bookstore-turned-Starbucks in midtown Toronto. The poll, which has made the news everywhere from Front Street to Fleet Street, suggests that after Toronto police Chief Bill Blair confirmed that his force had a video of Mayor Rob Ford appearing to smoke crack, the mayor’s approval rating went up, from 39 percent to 44. But in the same poll, 60 percent of Torontonians said he should resign.

“So I guess the question is, do you really conclude that people in Toronto are satisfied with his explanation or not?” Neuman says. “It’s not that conclusive.”

Neuman and Adams are graduates of the old school. At the Environics office, a half-block from the coffee shop, they have a copy of The Pulse of Democracy—George Gallup and Saul Rae’s sacred text on public opinion, published in 1940 and long out of print. Gallup and Rae warned that this might happen: “The answers may be inconsistent and confused,” they wrote. “But surely it is wise to know that such inconsistencies exist.” Was it wise, though, for journalists to elevate one answer over a contradictory one—especially when the jump in Ford’s approval rating was questionable?

“Was that the same poll?” Adams asks. “Yes.”

“Okay, and that he went up was compared to the same methodology?”

“Yeah,” Neuman says, “but it was a five-percentage-point difference.”

“Ohhh,” Adams says. There’s the rub.

“So, the margin of error is three or four percent,” Neuman continues.

“Okay. So, in fact, there’s no change,” Adams says. The Ford stories hinged on a bump that might not even exist.

But it didn’t take a man with 40 years of experience to notice this data distortion. Grenier, who has run ThreeHundredEight for five-and-a-half years, caught the problem too, and dismantled the “Ford’s numbers went up” narrative on his website. The mayor’s approval rating had hovered between 44 and 49 percent throughout the summer and dipped to 39 percent only in late October. “It seems much more likely,” Grenier wrote, “that his poll numbers decreased.” Within a day, it was the second-most-viewed post in the site’s history.

The first stories about Ford’s allegedly higher numbers were simple and rushed, like the poll itself. Forum’s robocall questionnaire was in the field within hours of Blair’s press conference, and the headlines (“Rob Ford’s approval rating ticks upward with news of crack video”) appeared the next day. Some of the stories—including those by the Toronto Star and CBC—also reported that 60 percent of respondents wanted the mayor to resign, but mentioned it later on in the story. It’s hard to beat a headline that says voters like a crack-smoking mayor.

If you’re comfortable blaming technology, please press 4

“It’s basically a half-hour job,” says Gloria Galloway, a reporter with the Globe’s parliamentary bureau. She’s been covering elections since 1997 and knows how to avoid the common pitfalls of poll stories. “I tend to do them between actually doing real stuff.” (This is partly because some survey results are embargoed, so a journalist can’t talk about them to anyone but the pollster.) They are an easy, if low-reward, solution for slow news days, says Susan Delacourt, the Star’s senior political writer. “The temptation is, ‘Oh, crap, we’ve got nothing today,’” she says. “‘Let’s just throw a poll into that space.’”

And journalists will probably never lack surveys for that space. In the past 10 years, pollsters have increasingly relied on interactive voice response (IVR), or “robocalls,” and online polls. Both are faster and cheaper than “live” phone calls, because machines don’t take paid lunch breaks or call in sick. In the age of caller ID, response rates have plunged into the single-digits, so it takes longer (and thus costs more) for a real person with a real voice to conduct a poll. A robocall, meanwhile, can easily reach a sample size of 1,000 in an evening. This is how, a day after Blair said he had a video of the mayor appearing to smoke crack, readers across Toronto knew what the city thought of that. In a 24-hour news cycle, this speed is invaluable for journalists.

Grenier often ignores the 24-hour cycle, despite the volume of available data. Instead of writing up each poll, he aggregates and analyzes them, looking for trends rather than insignificant shifts. It’s a model inspired by the work of Nate Silver, who rose from data-head to rock star in 2008, when he accurately predicted the winner of the U.S. presidential election in 49 of 50 states on his blog, FiveThirtyEight. Grenier—who, like Silver, has no formal training in polling but is a politics junkie—saw there was no Canadian equivalent and set out to become a neutral observer: his site is all about the numbers, rather than the people moving them. (ThreeHundredEight, which refers to the number of seats in the House of Commons, is a clear nod to FiveThirtyEight—the number of votes in the U.S. Electoral College.)

Five-and-a-half years later, Grenier is still analyzing polls in an attempt to cut through the simplistic “Party X is gaining on/ losing ground to/neck-and-neck with party Y” stories. He believes there’s often too much focus on top-line numbers: “You get a couple of quotes from the pollster and there’s your article.” Facing problems in polling and poll reporting, he hopes that ThreeHundredEight— and articles he writes for the Globe, The Hill Times and The Huffington Post Canada—are the way forward.

Grenier tries to determine a political party’s true support by weighting polls by factors such as when they were conducted and the research company’s track record. He believes this method is more accurate than individual polls—it’s the difference between looking at one snapshot of the Grand Canyon and flipping through an album. He has written at length about his methodology and those of marquee research firms, including thorough post-mortems of his own election forecasts after the votes have been tallied. “If Éric Grenier says the research is pretty good,” Neuman says, “I believe it and you should believe it.”

Not everyone is convinced, though. Nik Nanos of Nanos Research thinks Grenier does important work, but is concerned that he doesn’t have access to as much good data as Silver does. The technology that made polls faster has also thrown the quality of the results into question. The data’s speed is helpful for reporters; it also means they are publishing opinions about events that voters have had no time to digest—something Gallup and Rae warned about decades before the 24-hour news cycle became a reality.

That’s not the only hazard. No lunch breaks aside, robocalls have notoriously low response rates, produce unverifiable demographic data (“to lie about your income, press 2”) and skew toward people who are willing to talk to a machine. Michael Marzolini of Pollara, another research firm, says (half-jokingly) that the only people who finish robocall surveys are “shut-ins and convicts.”

Online polls may not reach the same demographics as IVR polls do, but they, too, present challenges to journalists. Many online poll respondents are self-selected—people who click on banner ads or sign up on a research company’s website. A pool of this kind of respondents does not constitute a random sample, so a margin of error can’t be calculated, and the anonymity the web offers makes it easier to lie about age, sex and anything else. (Some polling firms verify their respondents’ profiles in order to have more confidence in their data. For example, Nanos Research recruits people to its online polls with a phone call.) Self-selection can also lead to some journalistic slip-ups. In September 2013, Postmedia News reported on an online Environics Research Group poll that surveyed 807 women. The author noted that “a sample of this size would yield a margin of error of plus or minus 3.5 percent, 19 times out of 20.” The Environics poll was not a random sample—meaning that no margin of error should have been given.

That’s not to say online polls and IVR surveys inherently lack credibility. Both have scored victories: Abacus’s pre-election polls in the 2011 federal and Ontario elections, both conducted online, were close to the actual popular vote. Using robocalls, EKOS Research was within the margin of error in its final survey before the 2011 Ontario election. “People tend to hear these really vulgar generalizations about IVR polls or online polls,” says EKOS president Frank Graves. “There are good and bad examples of each.”

If you think thoroughness is underrated, please press 5

The problems with poll stories lie not only in the writing, but also in the reporting. When Nanos sent survey results to journalists 20 years ago, he’d get two calls: one from a reporter, looking for analysis, and a second from an editor, who’d ask, “Nik, are these all the questions in the study? Who paid for this poll? Was this a random sample or not?” Nanos was glad to take the calls. “We’re not talking about anything onerous,” he says, “but basically doing a quality check on the research.”

With less time to turn stories around and fewer eyeballs to vet them, this quality check has fallen by the wayside—and pollsters have noticed.

During the 2011 Ontario election campaign, Darrell Bricker and John Wright of Ipsos Public Affairs wrote an open letter calling for “better, more informed reporting” of polls, arguing journalists need to do a better job of “kicking the tires” on a survey before driving it into print.

Bricker was so passionate about it that, starting in 2012, he recorded five video tutorials that demonstrate proper tire-kicking technique and posted them to YouTube; he posted the sixth video (about how pollsters weight data to make their respondents look more like the general population) late last year. Meanwhile, Neuman says that while pollsters deserve some blame for bad coverage, journalists deserve the bulk of it “for not being cautious and applying some standards.”

Standards do exist for reporting on polls, but they are weak. The Canadian Press Stylebook is an exception; it devotes four pages to polling. CBC’s polling guidelines occupy two small sections of its standards and practices. Jack Nagler, CBC News’s director of journalistic public accountability and engagement, says reporters also work with the research department, which applies rigorous standards, based on industry guidelines, when determining whether a poll is fit to print. But the broadcaster’s ombudsman, Esther Enkin, recently found that “There is a lack of rigour in the process to ensure a consistent adherence to CBC’s policies and high standards.” The Star’s standards, on the other hand, run only three paragraphs and contain the basics, like how a poll story should include the sample size, margin of error and exact wording of the questions.

Better standards are easy to find. Outlets such as The New York Times, ABC News and The Washington Post are the ne plus ultra of poll journalism. Nanos insists that if Canadian outlets adopted the same standards as those outlets have, fewer polls would make it out of the newsroom. He’s right: the Times’s news surveys division effectively bans reporting on political parties’ internal polls, online surveys and robocalls. (Unsolicited robocalls from pollsters to cellphones are banned in the U.S., which means any IVR poll misses a growing segment of the population.)

The Times also exercises more control over its surveys. “We don’t commission a poll,” says Marjorie Connelly, the paper’s head of news surveys. “We do a poll.” TheTimes does everything on its own or with CBS News (the outlets have a long-standing partnership that keeps costs down), except for the polling itself. Several Canadian news outlets have relationships with pollsters— Sun News and Abacus, CP and Harris/Decima, CTV and Ipsos Reid—but journalists aren’t as involved in survey creation. Some major outlets used to have reporters and editors with polling expertise on staff to work with pollsters on questionnaire design, but that kind of training costs money, which has evaporated over the past decade.

Canadian journalists, meanwhile, play a less regulated version of the numbers game. In the 2011 federal election, the Globe and CTV commissioned a tracking poll from Nanos and reported on the results almost every day. In the final week of the campaign, all of the Globe’s reports included the margin of error and sample size, but only two mentioned the methodology. An April 27 story noted that the NDP was “firmly in second place,” though the gap between it and the Liberal Party was well within the margin of error—it was a statistical dead heat.

If you’re tired of the horse race stories, please press 6

Journalists often use polls to explain political manoeuvres (if the Conservatives attack the Liberals instead of the NDP, check the numbers to find out why). But political parties rely on private polls; they pay top dollar for surveys that are more thorough and precisely targeted than the free polls that journalists usually get.

Marzolini says a typical media poll will ask five or six questions, and only the “horse race” question makes the evening news: “If an election were held tomorrow, who would you vote for?” An internal poll for a candidate, on the other hand, might ask as many as 250 questions.

In her new book, Shopping for Votes, Delacourt explains that over the last 10 years, parties have increasingly relied on “micro- targeting” specific ridings—and even specific neighbourhoods within those ridings— in their polling, rather than casting a wide net. The shift from politics by poll to “politics by postal code” is a serious obstacle for journalists, who are left looking at inferior data. Delacourt thinks that, absent a serious investment in a detailed poll, reporters should get off the campaign bus and talk to voters about why they’re changing their minds. The horse race numbers can’t tell that story, she says, “just like a snapshot can’t capture something as well as a video.”

For some good news from Nova Scotia, please press 7

There wasn’t much movement to capture in Nova Scotia. The opposition Liberals led in every poll between the writ drop and election day, and in its final survey, Abacus pegged their support at 46 percent to 27 each for the Tories and the NDP. An hour after the polls closed, that looked pretty bang-on; during a live hit from the Liberals’ party in Bridgetown, N.S., Sun News Network reporter Paige MacPherson told Akin she’d just seen a tweet praising Abacus for getting it right. “You heard it here first!” she said.

Akin replied with the same chuckle he’d used on Coletto: “Well, I hope the best for our friends at Abacus, but I am waiting until all the votes are counted.” He knew better than to call it early: one of the first elections the show covered was B.C., where the polls had suggested that the NDP would sweep to victory. The incumbent Liberals won.

But he couldn’t ignore the numbers for long. Seven minutes later, Akin, feigning uncertainty, said to Coletto, “I’m looking at the percentage vote there and—gee, where have I seen those numbers before? Let’s see. It might have been a certain poll there, David.”

When things wrap up, Abacus’s final numbers will prove to be very close to the mark: 45.7 percent for the Liberals, 26.8 for the NDP and 26.3 for the Tories. Coletto was quick to note this. “Sun News/Abacus Data poll gets it right,” read the headline on his post-vote analysis for the Abacus website. A week after the election, Akin said on Battleground that Abacus’s final poll was “about as bang-on as you can get.” Grenier’s projections were also close, although the Tories’ vote share of 26.3 percent was just barely within his forecast.

One successful election call isn’t statistically significant, but another glimmer of hope appeared a month later in the Winnipeg Free Press. A Forum poll, released the day before a federal by-election in Brandon-Souris, suggested the Liberals held an astonishing 29-point lead over the Conservatives, who’d held the riding for all but four of the previous 60 years. But reporter Mary Agnes Welch raised questions about the survey’s methodology, spurred by residents claiming Forum had called them up to six times during the campaign. Her skepticism was vindicated on election night when the 29-point Liberal lead became a 1.4-point Conservative victory.

If you think poll stories can be rescued, please press 8.

If you remain undecided, please press 9. . . . . . . 

[beep]

This piece was published in the Spring 2014 issue of the Ryerson Review of Journalism.

By Ronan O’Beirne

Don’t panic.

Image via Maclean’s.

Or, okay, go ahead and panic. Whatever.

In case you’ve been living under a rock or haven’t checked your Vidéotron email: Pierre Karl Péladeau (or PKP), who served as CEO of self-styled “communications giant” Quebecor from 1999-2013, and vice-chair thereafter, is running for the Parti Québécois in the upcoming provincial election.

Realizing that it could be a wee conflict of interest to be a cabinet minister and vice-chair of a communications giant, Péladeau announced that he was resigning from his post on the board of directors, which is great.

He also told reporters that he had no intention to sell his shares in Quebecor, which CBC reported represent a 28 percent stake of Quebecor, Inc. and a majority stake in subsidiary Quebecor Media’s voting rights. Quebecor Media owns, among other properties, the Journal de Montréal, the nation-wide chain of Sunnewspapers, and broadcaster TVA.

One might call this problematic (if one wanted to understate the situation), and a possible violation of the legislature’s ethics code, if that’s the kind of thing one chooses to careabout.

PKP’s initial admission that he’d defy the ethics commissioner if he were told to divest Quebecor is a truly amazing unforced error.

— Andrew Coyne (@acoyne) March 11, 2014

It is one thing to have meddlesome owners sticking their noses into newsrooms for political purposes (Mr. Asper on line one), but quite another to have a meddlesome owner sticking his nose into newsrooms for both political purposes and personal advancement. As editor-turned-senator Joan Fraser told The Canadian Press*, “When you cross the line and become both a legislator and the proprietor of very powerful media voices, I think the situation becomes significantly more troublesome.”

Proving an owner’s hand in a newspaper or broadcaster’s editorial operations can be difficult, but for Péladeau, it is at least a problem of perception. In 2010, according to a survey** for the chaire de recherche en éthique du journalisme at the University of Ottawa, 50 percent of Quebec respondents thought that PKP’s corporation was the most likely media company to use its publications to advance its directors’ political and economic agendas. That number was effectively unchanged in another survey the next year.

Last year, Martin Patriquin of Maclean’s presented a few disturbing accusations of interference and agenda-setting by PKP, including at its newspapers. (For what it’s worth, Quebecor denied it all, and the Sun papers—Péladeau’s English-language fiefdom—say he’s a hands-off kind of guy.)

These are unfamiliar, if not necessarily uncharted, waters. Even the closest comparison isn’t close enough to be instructive: Michael Bloomberg, whose ownership of Bloomberg LP made him richer than Yemen, was not known for editorial interference before his three terms as mayor of New York City, and has only gotten his hands dirty since leaving office.

Concerns over editorial independence, particularly in communications giants like Quebecor, are not new in Canada. In 1981, the Kent Commission recommended legislation that “would raise the status and enhance the freedom of journalists by protecting their rights, if a newspaper is under an ownership that has major interests outside the newspaper, and provide an opportunity for the voice of the community, whose citizens have a particular stake in the quality of the local newspaper, to be heard.”

The commissioners may have meant major pecuniary interests (perhaps in forestry and shipbuilding), but surely a seat at the cabinet table counts as more than a minor interest.

*CP is 1/3-owned by Square Victoria Communications Group, which publishes La Presse and is a subsidiary of Power Corp., which was featured on the cover of Wednesday’s Quebecor-owned Journal de Montréal. La Presse put Péladeau on its cover.

**The 2010 poll was conducted via telephone by Écho Sondage, and surveyed 1,005 Quebeckers, aged 18 or older. It had a margin of error of +/- 3.1 percent, 19 times out of 20, and a response rate of 30.7 percent. The wording of the questions and responses can be found (in French) in CREJ’s report; the question about a media outlet’s economic or political agenda is on page nine. For insight into how journalists feel about ownership concentration, see page eight of this 2012 report from CREJ.

Remember to follow the Review and its masthead on Twitter. Email the blog editor here.

By Ronan O’Beirne

Ronan O’Beirne investigates the role and purpose of poll analysis in Canadian journalism. His story will be available in the Spring 2014 issue of the Ryerson Review of Journalism.

By Ronan O’Beirne

I spend an unhealthy amount of time on Reddit. It’s my go-to for funny stories that might be made up, graphs and discussion about hockey and pictures of train stations. (And the gifs. My God, the gifs.) I don’t go there for news, but sometimes I’ll see something on /r/worldnews that wouldn’t otherwise have crept into my regular browsing or Twitter feed, and that’s good.

Lots of Redditors use the site for exactly that purpose: to read and spread news. It’s like Twitter, if Twitter’s user interface were more awful. So it makes sense that the people who run Reddit are trying to encourage this use of the site by rolling out a breaking-news tool that allows a stream’s reporters to “post updates and anyone watching gets sent those updates in real time.” As he often does, Mathew Ingram of Gigaom has a good analysis of the tool’s implications for Reddit.

But not everyone is fond of the new feature, aptly named liveupdate.

Ingram got into a wee tiff on Twitter with Jared Keller of Al-Jazeera America, who wrote that Reddit “hasn’t proven that it’s consistently better at reporting than any other news org.” Others noted some of the hoaxes and mistruths that have circulated or originated on the site, and its infamous witch-hunt following the Boston marathon bombing.

@jaredbkeller @mathewi Reddit News Live, sponsored by the Sunil Tripathi Memorial Fund.

— Slade Sohmer (@SladeHV) February 25, 2014

Those are all fair points, and everything on Reddit needs to be taken with a few grains of salt. But its inaccuracies are a poor excuse for journalists whose knee-jerk reaction is to dismiss it, especially considering how many of them have embraced Twitter, which seems to kill a celebrity on a monthly basis.

Reporters have been slow to warm up to Reddit, dropping in for an occasional Ask Me Anything (AMA) and then scurrying back to the comfortable, familiar Twitter nest. This might have something to do with Reddit’s design, which reminds one of a primitive web forum, but journalists underestimate its potential at their own peril.

It takes work to build Reddit into something useful—even moreso than Twitter, which is more of a tabula rasa for new users. The default subreddits include such non-newsy topics as animal pictures, “Earth Porn” and “Explain Like I’m Five,” and even some of the good subreddits suffer from a glut of jargon and in-jokes. But it can also be a strong tool for gathering information; see one user’s use of social media to piece together the night of the Danzig shooting, two years ago.

The new liveupdate feature will probably bring out the best and worst of Reddit: information from people on the ground and misinformation from people nowhere near it. Using liveupdate, and Reddit more generally, to one’s advantage requires reporters to be skeptical and thorough—in short, it requires them to do their jobs. It’s understandable that this is difficult in the face of a still-young platform, but that shouldn’t scare off anyone.

Remember to follow the Review and its masthead on Twitter. Email the blog editor here.

Both gifs via Reddit, but you knew that.

“If something seems too good to be true, it probably is,” cautioned National Post baseball writer John Lott in November 2012, as fans whipped themselves into a frenzy over the Toronto Blue Jays. With everyone in baseball talking about the team—which had just completed a massive deal with the Miami Marlins for two starting pitchers and an all-star shortstop—Lott wasn’t prophesying defeat; he was simply applying some sober second thought. “In this business,” he says, “you have to try to maintain some kind of equilibrium and not get swept up.”

Lott may have been the only one not predicting how the Jays would do. The team was, after all, the story of last year’s off-season. It garnered unprecedented coverage during spring training and beat reporters foresaw great things. The Globe and Mail’s baseball writers—Jeff Blair, Tom Maloney and Robert MacLeod—each predicted the Jays would finish first or second in their division. Richard Griffin of the Toronto Star, who has covered the team since 1995, predicted it would make the World Series, but lose to Atlanta.

Of course, Toronto did not win the World Series. Not even close. The Jays finished last in their division, with a record only marginally better than the year before. Local baseball writers admit that pre-season predictions are just a bit of fun—not the kind of thing anyone hangs his hat on. While advanced statistics have the potential to make forecasts more reliable, this past Jays season showed once again that there are limits to using the past to predict the future.

Predictions have long been a staple of sports coverage. On the eve of the 1908 season, a New York Times baseball correspondent wrote, “With a fair share of luck coming their way, the Yankees have as good a chance of winning the pennant as any other club.” They finished last in the American League, but that didn’t matter, just as last year’s faulty predictions haven’t hurt anyone’s reputation. “That’s part of the beauty of it, how wrong we are,” says Shi Davidi, who covers the Blue Jays for Sportsnet and co-wrote a book with Lott about the 2013 season. “If the outcomes were so predictable, who cares? Why would you watch?” Sports forecasts are good fodder for talk radio and social media—“a talker, more than anything,” says Maloney, who is now the editor of the Globe’s automotive section.

It’s not just fun, though; baseball writers say their guesses are more than gut feelings. “It’s statistical analysis,” says Maloney, “but it’s also knowing the players.” With the 2013 Blue Jays, the thinking was, “On paper, if everyone has an average year, a couple of guys have great years and—big, big, big asterisk—everyone stays healthy, then they ought to have been able to compete.” That asterisk is a constant wrinkle in forecasting.

Lott, who doesn’t make predictions and doesn’t consider himself an expert, says those who do should start with the pitching rotation and the understanding that “one or two of these guys you know is gonna get hurt for two to five weeks in the season, maybe longer.” Injuries turned out to be one of the biggest factors in the disappointing showing, with many Jays players—including ones acquired in the off-season spending spree—sidelined for weeks at a time.

The severity of injuries is nearly impossible to predict, but the statistics era is starting to reduce the number of unknowns in forecasting. New ways of measuring performance have made it easier to crunch the numbers and produce objective predictions for individual players. These somewhat obscure statistics include NASA-like acronyms like VORP (how many runs a hitter gets, compared to a low-cost substitute) and PECOTA (a complicated calculation that projects overall performance). One Baseball Prospectus writer has even tried to quantify the risk of injury.

Derek Carty, a fantasy baseball analyst who has worked for stats websites like The Hardball Times and Baseball Prospectus, thinks these advanced statistics can help old-school commentators look beyond batting averages or earned runs. There are just too many things that affect a player’s performance, and “the human mind can’t comprehend all those factors,” he says. The stats revolution is most prominent in baseball, but other professional sports are catching up, with advanced metrics such as Corsi (shot attempts) and PDO (save percentage plus shooting percentage) cropping up more in NHL coverage. One possible reason for the rise in popularity of these new measures is the fact that, as Gabriel Desjardins explains on his hockey statistics website Behind the Net, more traditional criteria “don’t tell us very much about a player’s true value.”

But Carty admits there are limits to what the numbers can tell a scout, bookie or writer. “The stats tell you the ‘what’ and the scouting can tell you the ‘why,’” he says. Data points don’t explain, for example, why a player has a banner year and whether he’ll have another, “whereas the scouting maybe can.” Scouting also has the advantage of being more current. As the Blue Jays showed last year, stats from past performance are not necessarily predictive: the team that hit the turf at the Rogers Centre did not play like the roster assembled on paper.

This is part of why sportswriters have travelled to the team’s training facility in Dunedin, Florida: to see how the Blue Jays look and ask them how they feel about the season. “Baseball beat writers spend anywhere from four to six weeks at spring training, and by the end of that time, you’ve had a great many conversations with managers and general managers and players,” Maloney says. So when it comes time to make predictions, “It’s not just looking on paper.”

The 2014 Blue Jays look a lot like last year’s team, with a few exceptions: small acquisitions and rumours that a couple of minor-league pitchers may be on their way up. But the hopeful predictions that crept into last year’s coverage, when the words “World Series” were nearly synonymous with “Toronto,” have been absent so far. With opening day just over a month away, the focus has been more on what the team lacks than on what it might be—and maybe that’s not a bad thing.