How To Turn Off Someone Doing You A Favor

A press inquiry email list called helpareporter.com lets journalists mention story ideas to those who might might have sources or information available. It costs nothing and is generally useful. Peter Shankman, the PR person who runs it, has posted an interesting interchange with someone who signed up for the service and, apparently, took umbrage at the welcome auto response.

Quite a hard-assed reaction, eh? I wondered about this willingness to "share with reporters" and went to her site. I eventually found what a viatical settlement was, after some poking about. But, my, much of the site to me radiates irritation and unpleasantness. For example:

This website has more than 200 pages of free information. More information is available through our books, many of which can be borrowed from your local library. Please do not contact us for additional free information. We have neither the time nor the resources to allow us to respond -- and we do receive many inquiries each week. However, when there are a number of questions on the same issue, such as "Should Investors Pay Premiums?" we will publish a Special Report.

And how is she supposed to hear the questions when she's telling people not to ask her questions, just to buy the book? Jeez.

The Turning of the Word Factoid

While listening to the NPR word show Says You, I heard an interesting bit on the word factoid, and figured that I'd do some additional research and write it up. I've found that people increasingly use factoid, at least in publishing, as a little bit of information used by itself, often in a little box or as part of an info graphic.

Yet the history is more interesting. Norman Mailer invented the term, combining fact with the suffix "oid," which means being like something, in his 1973 biography of Marilyn Monroe. What's like a fact but isn't a fact? A piece of information that's appeared so often that people assume it to be a fact, even though it may be incorrect.

This reminds me of a story that I wrote in the late 90s for Computer Shopper. Much of the technology press was using a statistic that 1 out of every 14 laptops was stolen. The stated source of the number was a company that offers computer insurance - and at the time, a laptop policy was about $100 a year, while laptops themselves were easily $1500 a year. That means the weighted average loss would be $210 dollar. In other words, the company would have lost, on the average, $110 per policy every year. Furthermore, so far as I could tell, neither the insurance industry nor law enforcement actually tracked the number of laptops stolen.

It sounded like misinformation designed to increase sales, so I talked to the company and it agreed with me that the number was bogus. But it came into being independently of them (though I didn't see them working hard to debunk it). The company tracked losses, which included damage and not just theft. Then it had its own estimate of the number of PCs in the world and projected out a whole number of stolen laptops. But it specifically never released how many laptops it thought there were; my guess is that the number would seem unrealistically high.

Then, supposedly, someone from a major technology publication took that number, matched it to some unrelated estiamte of the number of laptops, and came up with the 1 in 14 "statistic." Voila!: the birth of a factoid.