Tag: Boston Globe

Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble

Who writes the blog “Paper Economy”? I have no idea. And that is why I’m writing this item.

“Paper Economy” is billed as “A US Real Estate Bubble Blog.” Based on a post yesterday about the Boston Globe’s paean to Arlington, I’d say the blogger falls into the category of “sharp but too caustic for his own good,” which is a bulging category indeed. But his anonymity makes it difficult to judge his credibility. The offensive picture above is what he uses for his Blogger profile, accompanied by the phrase “I don’t need no stinking housing bubble!” Really.

Mr. (or Ms.) Paper Economy’s numbers seem impressive. But he writes as though Globe reporter Sacha Pfeiffer pulled her numbers out of thin air, which is clearly not the case. For instance, here is an eye-opening statistic in Pfeiffer’s piece:

As of early October, the average number of days houses sat on the market in Arlington before selling was 83, substantially less than the 146-day average for all of Eastern Massachusetts, according to the Multiple Listing Service Property Information Network.

Mr. P.E. (also known as Dimitris) does not actually challenge that number. Instead, he uses another set of MLS numbers thusly:

[L]ooking at the completed single family home sales for 2007 shows that 156 of 235 homes sold, or a whopping 66.4%, were sold UNDER LIST while only 56 homes, or 23.8%, were sold over the list price.

Taking into account the fact that Arlington has seen an average of 50% of all listed single family homes have price reductions (currently 55%), the sheer number of homes still selling under list is staggering.

Now, that’s important information, and it does run counter to the main theme in Pfeiffer’s story, which is that the good times continue to roll in Arlington. Indeed, she opens with an anecdote about a guy who recently sold his home for more than its listed price. If two-thirds of homes in Arlington are selling for less than list, as Mr. P.E.’s numbers show, then she should have included that fact.

But just as she does not deal with Mr. P.E.’s numbers, so, too, does Mr. P.E. fail to engage with Pfeiffer’s numbers showing that homes in Arlington are on the market for a much shorter period of time than in other communities. That’s a pretty good hook for Pfeiffer’s story, I’d say.

Mr. P.E. also writes:

Still further, the year-to-date median selling price for a home in Arlington is in fact $465,500, the lowest seen since 2003, according to the Warren Group NOT the $510,000 as reported in the article.

In fact, I don’t see where the Boston Globe got the $510,000 figure as it doesn’t match the median number reported for the year-to-date figure, the latest reported month or the current calendar year.

He doesn’t see where the Globe got the $510,000 figure? Hmmm … I think I’ve found it: “Among single-family houses, the median price in Arlington is $510,000, according to Warren Group, a Boston publisher of real estate data.”

Now, if you follow the link offered by Mr. P.E., you will find that it takes you to the self-same Warren Group. But he doesn’t show anything reporting that the median housing price in Arlington is $465,500. Rather, you have to register (sorry; not going to do it) and track down the information yourself.

I don’t know whether Pfeiffer did that or if, instead, she interviewed someone at the Warren Group who gave her the $510,000 figure. What I do know is that Mr. P.E. blithely asserts that she’s wrong without having any way of knowing whether her number is based on the same set of assumptions as his.

As I said earlier, Mr. P.E. seems pretty sharp. His post is not without value. But at the root of his screed is his belief that the Globe is in the tank to the real-estate business. Are newspapers dependent on real-estate advertising? Oh, my. Of course they are. But there’s a long, long leap from understanding that obvious fact to believing that Pfeiffer would write a story claiming real estate in Arlington is hot when it’s really cold.

Mr. P.E. goes so far as to demand “a complete retraction” of what he calls Pfeiffer’s “fictitious article.” He even includes Globe editor Marty Baron’s e-mail address. And you should definitely check out his response to an e-mail Baron sent him. I recommend decaf.

Mr. P.E. may know his stuff. As he points out, his posts have been featured at the Motley Fool and TheStreet.com, among other financial sites. But his anonymity, the picture he uses and his assumption of ill will on the Globe’s part undermine his case to the vanishing point.

More alleged news

Would the New York Times Co. please, please, please sell its 17 percent stake in the Red Sox? Then, when the Boston Globe publishes a press release like this on the front of the business section, we can attribute it to simple bad news judgment rather than more nefarious motives. Good grief.

Oh, yeah, and this one too — although I suppose it actually qualifies as news.

Update: Boston Daily beat me to it.

What’s bugging Tim Cahill

State Treasurer Tim Cahill is very upset that U.S. Customs agents harassed his family when they flew home from Italy recently because one of his daughters was found carrying peaches (Globe story here; Herald story here). “As a citizen who cares about security, I think that the time needs to be spent better and maybe on less serious issues than peaches,” Cahill is quoted as saying.

Both papers report having made unsuccessful attempts to get government officials to comment (the Globe’s Andrea Estes appears to have tried quite a bit harder than the Herald’s Dave Wedge), and then leave it at that. But about three seconds of Googling would have revealed what their intuition should have told them in the first place — that fruit can carry non-native insects and other nasties that could wreak havoc if they get loose in the United States.

Here’s part of a press release on a food-sniffing dog that works for the Houston Airport system:

During their training, these canines are taught to alert their human counterparts when they sniff five primary odors: apple, citrus, mango, pork and beef. Plants and flowers are also at the top of the dogs’ target items list.

These target items are foreign to the United States and may contain certain diseases and insects that are not currently present in the country. The function of CBP [Customs and Border Protection] is to prevent these potentially dangerous items from entering the country and, by the same token, to prevent foreign items from the U.S. entering other countries.

Meats can carry livestock diseases, such as swine fever and mad cow disease that can kill American livestock. Fruits and vegetables, on the other hand, can carry insects or diseases, such as the Mediterranean fruit fly or citrus canker, which can wipe out hundreds of acres of the U.S.’s agriculture.

Or maybe we could review how Dutch elm disease, spread by bark beetles, came to wipe out the graceful elm trees that used to line the streets of Boston and other American cities. According to this Wikipedia entry (corroborated by the Encyclopedia Britannica):

The disease was first reported in the United States in 1928, with the beetles believed to have arrived in a shipment of logs from the Netherlands destined for the Ohio furniture industry. The disease spread slowly from New England westward and southward, almost completely destroying the famous Elms in the “Elm City” of New Haven, reaching the Detroit area in 1950, the Chicago area by 1960, and Minneapolis by 1970.

Maybe the agents who stopped the Cahills acted unprofessionally and didn’t bother to explain themselves. Maybe they were unnecessarily rude, the default mode for too many government officials with a little bit of power. But certainly they had a legitimate reason to confiscate the peaches. Too bad the papers didn’t make more of an attempt to find out why.

Even better: Steve finds the notice at left on the Customs Web site. It begins: “We regret that it is necessary to take agricultural items from your baggage. They cannot be brought into the United States because they may carry animal and plant pests and diseases. Restricted items include meats, fruits, vegetables, plants, soil, and products made from animal or plant materials.”

Teasing the Globe

Joe Keohane, Jeff Keating and Adam Reilly are all quite taken with the Boston Globe‘s new “In the news” front-page teasers, which run the length of the left-hand column. Joe even goes so far as to call the feature “a web-influenced sidebar.”

Well, pardon me, but there’s nothing even remotely new about what the Globe is doing. Certainly it’s no different from the “Newsline” column that appears on the front of USA Today (left). The Boston Herald ran similar teasers following its sparkling 1999 redesign, but gave them up after its New York Post-ification a few years later. (Unfortunately, Ron Reason, the consultant who oversaw the redesign, has removed the sample Herald fronts from his Web site.)

That’s not to say the Globe teasers aren’t a good idea. They are. They’re also intriguing from a strategic point of view. The vast majority of Globes are sold via home delivery, but there’s no need to flog the inside content for customers who are retrieving the paper from their front porches.

The teasers say that Globe executives have decided there’s circulation to be gained by persuading more people to buy a copy on their way to work. But aren’t these the same people who are reading the Globe online, for free, once they get to work?

That’s the 50-cents-per-copy question.

Menino’s and/or the Globe’s faux pas

Sharp-eyed Media Nation reader R.S. passes this along, from Boston Globe columnist Adrian Walker’s piece on the fire in West Roxbury that claimed the lives of two firefighters:

“They always put their needs before our own,” Mayor Thomas M. Menino said at a press conference. “But it doesn’t make it any easier to deal with the tragedy.”

R.S.’s take: “I wouldn’t be surprised if Menino said it, but Walker and the Globe copy editors thought it was OK???”

Not OK.

Saturday afternoon update: Given the amount of interest sparked by this item, I went searching for video of Menino speaking. No luck so far. For what it’s worth, the city’s official Web site has Menino saying that “they always put our needs before their own.”

A teaching moment (II)

Today’s Globe editorial on lagging test scores among minority teaching candidates takes a sensible approach:

Inadequate preparation, not cultural bias, is the most likely explanation for the high failure rate among black and Hispanic candidates. Similar to the achievement gap problem between white and minority students, a solution requires educators to target the academic deficiencies of prospective teachers and provide them with remedial support.

No talk of doing away with the test, which was one of the subthemes of the Globe’s Sunday story. Good.

A teaching moment

This, from the top story in today’s Boston Globe, is a very strange lede:

More than half the black and Hispanic applicants for teaching jobs in Massachusetts fail a state licensing exam, a trend that has created a major obstacle to greater diversity among public school faculty and stirred controversy over the fairness of the test.

Are diversity and fairness really the first things we ought to think about when we encounter such information? No, I didn’t think so.

Monday morning quarterbacking: An anonymous commenter thinks I’m being unfair to the Globe because the news hook was, in fact, a state investigation into why minority teaching candidates are faring so poorly on the test. A fair point, but in the main I disagree. In this case, the Globe shouldn’t have bought into the state’s notion of what’s newsworthy.

What’s news is that many teaching applicants are failing a basic state licensing test — and that, in the case of black and Latino applicants, at least some advocates are saying we should do away with the test. If all the questions are as easy as the two examples offered by the Globe, then blaming the test is ludicrous.

You go first, Mr. Cohen

Don’t you feel completely reassured now that the state has told us the feds are wrong about the Zakim Bridge‘s being on the verge of collapse?

OK, I exaggerate — but not by nearly as much, I suspect, as state transportation secretary Bernard Cohen was when he told the Globe’s Scott Allen, “It is not a safety issue, but rather a defect associated with the installation.”

Of course, the loose bolts in the tunnel were not a safety issue unless you happened to be driving through it when one of them let go.

This is exactly the kind of story that can have a far bigger impact now, following the collapse of the bridge in Minneapolis, than it normally would. Bridge- and road-safety stories can have a quality of abstractness to them unless readers have a clear picture in their minds of people plunging to their death.

I assume — I hope — that the Globe is going to keep hammering away at this. No doubt Cohen and his boss, Gov. Deval Patrick, are freaking out at the prospect of another multizillion-dollar repair job. But people will have to understand that it wasn’t the Patrick administration who oversaw this shoddy project, and that it’s worth any price to prevent what happened in Minneapolis from happening here.

Yesterday, the Outraged Liberal argued for a higher gas tax instead of an increase in tolls. Unfortunately, we may need both. As well as lawsuits against the responsible contractors from here to eternity.

Photo of Zakim Bridge (cc) by Ron’s Log. Some rights reserved.