Failed Scoop

Last week’s TIME magazine reminded me of one of the best and one of the worst things about working at a magazine with such a long lead time (the bimonthly Psychology Today.) Here’s a large chunk of the mini-story titled "MINI-PIMP IS MAD" on page 18* of TIME’s December 4 issue:

"If you spot a car sporting the license plate LOLITA or MINI-PIMP, change lanes. Psychologists at Colorado State University have found that people who give their car a name or gender are more likely to express road rage … So if you come across the SWEAT-BOX OF DEATH–a name actually given by one of the study’s participants to his Ford Bronco–steer clear."

That’s really interesting. Especially because it’s not true. Here, let me quote the actual research paper:

"Drivers of named vehicles did not report higher levels of driving aggression … In addition, those who gave their vehicles more aggressive names… did not report significantly higher aggression…"

Ouch. That’s gotta hurt. Well, maybe the TIME writers didn’t dig deeply. Maybe they just read a summary and were misled. Oh wait, looky here, right in the paper’s abstract: "…initial decision of drivers to anthropomorphize did not relate to differences in aggressive driving tendencies." Oopsies!

I also wonder: Why was a story under 150 words long given two bylines? That’s kinda tacky. And both writers fucked it up? That’s just embarrassing.

Further (getting nitpicky), Why is "SWEAT-BOX OF DEATH" all in caps, as if it were a license plate? A.) That name wasn’t on a license plate; it was just the driver’s name for the car.** B.) That name WON’T FIT on a license plate.

What does Psychology Today have to do with the story? We covered this research (there were other, significant, findings in the paper) for the next issue of PT to hit newsstands. [Update: It’s now online.]  So here’s the bad about our schedule: We got scooped. We get scooped easily. (I found this paper and contacted the researchers back in September.) It makes my job of finding untapped news stories very hard.

But the good: We have the time to be accurate. We can’t always be the first, so we try to be the best.

When I mentioned TIME’s gaffe to lead researcher Jacob Benfield, he replied: "imagine that, the media altering fact… Thanks for actually reading the article."

* Damnit, why are there no page numbers between 6 and 31? I hate counting.

** Here are the names listed in the paper: "Lolita, the Sweat-box of Death, Herbie, the Silver Bullet, Contessa, Mini-Pimp, and Jolly Green Giant." For the PT article, I asked intern John Ruddy to do some person(and car)-on-the-street interviews. He came back with some good stuff, including the car names Daisy (also known as Falcor the Luck Dragon), Sven the Swedish (pronounced Svee-dish; it’s a Saab), The Hearse (a black Volvo station wagon), and Pocahonda.