The LA Times: Where They Like To Have Entertainment Reporters Cover Science
It's just a blog item, and I have yet to read the study, but just glancing at the few lines of text, there's much to be snarly about.
But, a little background: The LA Times has a tendency of moving over reporters from fashion, Metro, and other general interest reporting positions to report on science, as if they can just slide down from the red carpet to the land of beakers and probabilities and get right down to business.
Mary MacVean blogs in the LA Times, in "Nice preteens don't finish last":
Kindness matters - if a child wants to be happy and popular, researchers say.Preteens assigned to do three acts of kindness a week found they were better liked than kids who were assigned to visit three places of their choice a week, the researchers from UC Riverside and the University of British Columbia wrote Wednesday in the journal PLoS One.
"Increasing peer acceptance is a critical goal, as it is related to a variety of important academic and social outcomes, including reduced likelihood of being bullied," the researchers wrote.
They say it's the first study to link performance of a simple helping behavior to an increase in popularity. Previous studies have shown that there's a link between happy people and popular people, and that happy people are more likely to do helpful or kind things.
My comment at the site:
Hey, LA Times, do you have to pay the reporter extra to get the researchers names in the story? Some of them are even local -- Sonja Lyubomirsky, for example. The researchers names: Kristin Layous. Katherine Nelson, Eva Oberle, Kimberly A. Schonert-Reichl, Sonja Lyubomirsky.Also, somebody might like to actually read the article, which happens to be open-source (meaning free to read), especially considering that your science reporters so rarely have a background in, you know, science. Here's a link to the study.
Finally, about this: "Both groups showed increases in positive effect and satisfaction." I have yet to read the study, but I'm pretty sure that should be "positive affect." Of course, general interest reporters moved over to take notes on science would not have heard the common term in psychology, "affect," meaning a display of emotion.
Keep up the great science reporting!
Screen shot in case they edit the piece in the wake of my comment: 
More from Mary MacVean in the LA Times.
Hmm, next thing you know, LAT editors will be ringing me up to cover The...The...what's our LA football team called? Hmmm...do we actually have a football team?
"Hmmm...do we actually have a football team?"
No, sadly you do not. The Rams moved to St. Louis for the 1995 season and have been there ever since. The team started in Cleveland in 1936, then moved to Los Angeles in 1946. Also, the Oakland Raiders were located in Los Angeles from 1982 to 1994. From time to time, there's talk about moving a team back to Los Angeles, but nothing serious in recent years. Now you know more than most.
Of course, I got all that from Wikipedia and listening to NFL radio. Ten minutes of research, tops. I wonder if the LA Times blogger had the time or inclination to dig a little deeper into her story.
Old RPM Daddy (OldRPMDaddy at GMail dot com) at December 27, 2012 4:53 AM
Amy Alkon
https://www.advicegoddess.com/archives/2012/12/the-la-times-wh.html#comment-3532152">comment from Old RPM Daddy (OldRPMDaddy at GMail dot com)Oh, and I was just pretending about the football team. Of course, I only know this because Gregg has mentioned this and because there's some talk of building a bazillion-dollar stadium with all the money we don't have. *That* news I keep track of.
Amy Alkon
at December 27, 2012 6:04 AM
"Oh, and I was just pretending about the football team."
Well, yeah. But you gave me an opportunity to blather on about sports and I took it. But here's the thing: While I knew the Rams and Raiders had moved around some, I knew I still had to verify when these things happened. For a reporter not to do some basic background research strikes me as a little sloppy, but since I'm not in that business, I can't really say for sure. Is this a growing problem, in your view?
By the way -- I can talk a little to the stadium issue. D.C. paid a lot of money to put up a new stadium for the Nationals (that's a baseball team, incidentally), insisting that it would revitalize the area around the Navy Yard. Landover, Maryland's FedEx Field, where the Redskins play, was privately funded.
Old RPM Daddy (OldRPMDaddy at GMail dot com) at December 27, 2012 6:31 AM
Amy Alkon
https://www.advicegoddess.com/archives/2012/12/the-la-times-wh.html#comment-3532177">comment from Old RPM Daddy (OldRPMDaddy at GMail dot com)The crazy thing is, Sonja Lyubomirsky LIVES IN LA! The LA Times is never more allergic to mentioning people than if they live here. Though this reporter simply mentioned the study as if it were done by the universities themselves. This is often the case in newspapers, and a case more often done, I would bet, by people who are just visiting science.
I know many or maybe even most of the researchers whose work I read, if not from hearing them present at conferences, where their work is criticized by others in the audience, from reading a body of their work. They seem more like people, deserving of credit, when you do that. Sonja Lyubomirsky is a researcher I've had on my show a number of times, and whom I have quoted in my column. She is a rigorous researcher and has some really important findings in her work. I believe Layous is her student, if I remember correctly. Love that she's the first author on this -- great to see younger researchers cultivated by more experienced ones. (Sonja sent me an earlier study she did with Layous -- researchers whose work I often use often remember to do that.)
Also, readers can actually read this study, which is open-source, and some may want to read the abstract when it is not. Yet, no link? Crap behavior.
I'm guessing this girl just read the press release from one of the universities -- just speculation on my part, but I bet I'm right. And that's not reporting; that's stenography, if it's what she did.
Amy Alkon
at December 27, 2012 6:44 AM
As with water, you have to steal your football teams from nor cal.
I love that my page view has the phrase "Kindness matters – if a child wants to be happy and popular, researchers say" ... right next to a pic of some pot leaves illustrating the story, "Marijuana use among teens rises." Well yes, that's one route to popularity.
smurfy at December 27, 2012 10:57 AM
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