Skating on the Charles River

Inspired by Doc Searls, I went skating today in "the Cove" -- a backwater of the Charles River in Newton, where there is essentially no flow to the water and, as a result, thick ice.

How the Lawyers Stole Winter

[This is an essay that I wrote that first appeared in the Atlantic in March 1995. I am posting it here so that it can be read online.]

NOTES & COMMENT

HOW THE LAWYERS STOLE WINTER

Pond skating in the changed context

of childhood

By

Christopher B. Daly

© 1995

When I was a boy, my friends and I would come home from school each day, change our clothes (because we were not allowed to wear "play clothes" to school), and go outside until dinnertime. In the early 1960s in Medford, a city on the outskirts of Boston, that was pretty much what everybody did. Sometimes there might be flute lessons or an organized Little League game, but usually not. Usually we kids went out and played.

In winter, on our way home from the Gleason School, we would go past Brooks Pond to check the ice. By throwing heavy stones onto it, hammering it with downed branches and, finally, jumping on it, we could figure out if the ice was ready for skating. If it was, we would hurry home, grab our skates, our sticks, and whatever other gear we had, and then return to play hockey for the rest of the day. When the streetlights came on, we knew it was time to jam our cold, stiff feet back into our green rubber snow boots and get home for dinner.

I had all these memories in mind recently when I moved, with my wife and our two young boys, into a house near a lake even closer to Boston, in the city of Newton. As soon as Crystal Lake froze over, I grabbed my skates and headed out. I was not the first one there, though: the lawyers had beaten me to the lake. They had warned the town Recreation Department to put it off limits. So I found a sign that said:

DANGER

THIN ICE

NO SKATING

Knowing a thing or two about words myself, I put my own gloss on the sign. I took it to mean, When the ice is thin, then there is danger, and there should be no skating. Fair enough, I thought, but I knew that the obverse was also true: When the ice is thick, then it is safe, and there should be skating. Finding the ice plenty thick, I laced up my skates and glided out onto the miraculous glassy surface of a frozen lake. My wife, a native of Manhattan, would not let me take our two boys with me. But for as long as I could, I enjoyed the free, open-air delight of skating as it should be. After a few days, others joined me, and we became an outlaw band of skaters.

What we were doing was once the heart of winter in New England – and a lot of other places, too. It was clean, free exercise that needed no Stairmasters, no health clubs, no appointments, and hardly any gear. Sadly, it is in danger of passing away. Nowadays it seems that every city and town and almost all property holders are so worried about liability and lawsuits that they simply throw up a sign or a fence and declare that henceforth there shall be no skating, and that's the end of it.

As a result, kids today live in a world of leagues, rinks, rules, uniforms, adults, and rides – rides here, rides there, rides everywhere. It is not clear that they are better off, and in some ways they are clearly not better off.

* * *

When I was a boy skating on Brooks Pond, there were almost no grown-ups around. Once or twice a year, on a weekend day or a holiday, some parents might come by, with a thermos of hot cocoa. Maybe they would build a fire -- which we were forbidden to do -- and we would gather round.

But for the most part the pond was the domain of children. In the absence of adults, we made and enforced our own rules. We had hardly any gear – just some borrowed hockey gloves, some hand-me-down skates, maybe an elbow pad or two – so we played a clean form of hockey, with no high-sticking, no punching, and almost no checking. A single fight could ruin the whole afternoon. Indeed, as I remember it 30 years later, it was the purest form of hockey I ever saw – until I got to see the Russian national team play the game.

But before we could play, we had to check the ice. We became serious junior meteorologists, true connoisseurs of cold. We learned that the best weather for pond skating is plain, clear cold, with starry nights and no snow. (Snow not only mucks up the skating surface but also insulates the ice from the colder air above.) And we learned that moving water, even the gently flowing Mystic River, is a lot less likely to freeze than standing water. So we skated only on the pond. We learned all the weird whooping and cracking sounds that ice makes as it expands and contracts, and thus when to leave the ice.

Do kids learn these things today? I don't know. How would they? We don't even let them. Instead, we post signs. Ruled by lawyers, cities and towns everywhere try to eliminate their legal liability. But try as they might, they cannot eliminate the underlying risk. Liability is a social construct; risk is a natural fact. When it is cold enough, ponds freeze. No sign or fence or ordinance can change that.

In fact, by focusing on liability and not teaching our kids how to take risks, we are making their world more dangerous. When we were children, we had to learn to evaluate risks and handle them on our own. We had to learn, quite literally, to test the waters. As a result, we grew up to be more savvy about ice and ponds than any kid could be who has skated only under adult supervision on a rink.

When I was a boy, despite the risks we took on the ice no one I knew ever drowned. The only people I ever heard about who drowned were graduate students at Harvard or MIT who came from the tropics and were living through their first winters. Not knowing about how ice forms on moving water (After all, how could they?), they would innocently venture out onto the half-frozen Charles River, fall through, and die. They were literally out of their element.

Are we raising a generation of children who will be out of their element? And if so, what can we do about it? We cannot just roll back the calendar. I cannot tell my six-year-old to head down to the lake by himself to play all afternoon – if for no other reason, he will not find twenty or thirty other kids there, full of the collective wisdom about cold and ice that they have inherited from their older brothers and sisters. Somewhere along the line that link got broken.

The whole setting of childhood has changed. We cannot change it again overnight. I cannot send them out by themselves yet, but at least some of the time, I can go out there with them. Maybe that is a start.

* * *

As for us, last winter was a very unusual one. We had ferocious cold (near-zero temperatures on many nights) and tremendous snows (about a hundred inches in all). Eventually a strange thing happened. The city gave in – sort of. Sometime in January, the Recreation Department "opened" a section of the lake, and even dispatched a snowplow truck to clear a good-sized patch of ice. I brought the boys, and we skated the rest of winter. Ever vigilant, the city officials kept the "Thin Ice" signs up, even though their own truck could safely drive on the frozen surface. And they brought in "lifeguards" and all sorts of rules about the hours we could skate and where we had to stay.

But at least we were able to skate in the open air, on real ice.

And it was still free.

How the Lawyers Stole Winter by Christopher B. Daly is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

[First published in The Atlantic Monthly in March 1995]

On thin ice

Just a quick experiment.

I am trying to link to an essay I wrote about pond skating 15 years ago now in The Atlantic. It was published, in print only, just a few months before the month the magazine later chose arbitrarily as the starting point for its on-line archives. So, my essay, in effect, does not exist online.

I still own the copyright, and I even paid $2.95 to access my own work in hopes of posting it here. I want to see if the link works.

Of course, if you have any interest in reading about pond skating, be my guest.

Math for journalists (cont.)

By Chris Daly

Here's an excellent blog post about the Times' front page piece on Sunday about the hazards of radiation therapy. The post is written by Adam Katz, a student at Harvard Law School, who makes the important point that the figures presented in the article are not put in context. We are told how many bad outcomes there were from radiation, but not told the total number. So there is literally no way of knowing whether this is a good thing or a bad thing.

Journalists love anecdotes (and they have their place), but they really don't belong in a piece about science or public health, except as inducements for the reader to begin reading. The

Times credits six reporters with working on this piece, starting at least as far back as last summer.

The one graf in the Times piece that provides some context is buried on page 7 (of 8 -- how's that for context?). It says the Varian company filed 70 reports of "potential problems" with the FDA in 2008. In that same year, that one company carried out some 35 million radiation treatments. So, the rate of potential problems was ______ ?

Let's see: 35 million divided by 10 is 3.5 million. One tenth of that is 350,000. So that would be a 1 percent error rate.

Working downward from there, one tenth of 350,000 is 35,000. So, that would be 0.10%

One tenth of that is 3,500, or 0.01%

One tenth of that is 350, or 0.001%

And 70 is one fifth of that, so that would be 0.0002%

Now, as Adam points out, we as patients may believe that such an error rate is unacceptably high, but we can't even get started in thinking rationally about radiation without seeing some of these numbers in context. What, for example, is the risk to a given patient of doing nothing? That would be a good story for the Times to pursue next.

A NEW MODEL?

By Chris Daly

Could this be it? The Times just announced that it will start charging for some of its material.

Here's the lede:

The New York Times announced Wednesday that it intended to charge frequent readers

for access to its Web site, a step being debated across the industry that nearly every major

newspaper has so far feared to take.

It sounds as though they are adopting the "fremium" model: Give some content away for free, in order to lure people to your site, but keep some premium content behind a wall so you can charge more for it. This is a variation on an experiment the Times tried earlier, called Times Select. That was based on charging for particular columns, rather than on the user's volume.

Will this work? Who knows?

Is it worth trying? Probably

Why wait until 2011? I have no idea.

New Reporting Resources

By Chris Daly

Kudos to my colleagues at BU for bringing a terrific story to the front page of today's Boston Globe. The story concerns the ill-tempered efforts by police to intimidate citizens from using their cell phones and other gizmos to record police behavior.

The piece was supervised by Profs. Dick Lehr (author: The Fence) and Mitch Zuckoff (author: Altman), who teach a course at BU on investigative reporting. They steered the story to completion with help from the BU-based New England Center for Investigative Reporting, which is run by veteran investigators Maggie Mulvihill and Joe Bergantino.

Aside from a terrific story, this piece may provide an example of an emerging trend: as journalistic enterprises like the Globe lose reporting resources (i.e., reporters), some of the slack may be taken up by non-profits like universities. What's important is that the resulting stories be just as tough, sharp, accurate, and thorough as they can be.

SAD NEWS

By Chris Daly

Like many former and current contributors, like many readers, and like many people who care about the state of journalism, I was saddened to hear that the Washington Post is closing all of its remaining domestic bureaus -- in NYC, Chicago, and L.A. (Those three are the last remnants of what was once a network of about a dozen postings around the country.) Gradually, the paper is being dismantled.

One egregious insult was the statement by Executive Editor Marcus Brauchli, who was quoted in the paper on Tuesday saying, "The fact is we can effectively cover the rest of the country from Washington."

That is an impressively dishonest statement. (And one that the Post's media writer, Howie Kurtz, apparently accepted at face value and inflicted on his readers without any further ado.)

Sad.

PERSPECTIVE

By Chris Daly

There has been a lot of talk lately about the White House campaign to shun and discredit Fox News. (Personally, I think it's a mistake, because it means the president is "punching down" or fighting below his weight class. The most likely outcome is to raise the stature of Fox News.)

What I have not seen are any comprehensive, current figures on the size of the audiences for Fox News and for un-Fox News. I scoured Nielsen, TV Watch, and the PEJ annual State of the Media report. I tried to keep the comparisons valid (at least to my mind) by seeing how they all stack up in the 6-7 p.m. hour on weeknights. This is the only time of day when all these outlets are putting forward what they consider to be their best "hard news" programs. I have deliberately excluded prime time shows, morning shows, rant programs, and staged shouting matches.

Here's what I found:

Broadcast

NBC 8,309,000

ABC 7,646,000

CBS 5,683,000

PBS 2,700,000

subtotal 24,338,000

Cable

CNN 537,000

MSNBC 543,000

HLN 381,000

subtotal 1,461,000

Total non-Fox News: 25,797,000

Total Fox News: 2,437,000

In other words, at an hour of the day when a lot of Americans watch news on television and have to decide which they like best, Fox reaches about 8.6 percent of those who are watching. Another way to look at it, of course, is to say that 91.4 percent of Americans prefer something other than Fox News.

HIJACKING THE NEWS

By Chris Daly

I have been thinking a lot lately about the recent flap over the coverage of ACORN. It has been the subject of much commentary, including the most recent NYTimes public editor's comment and others, but no one (that I have seen) has quite put a finger on what I think is the real issue here.

In my experience, when a news organization is confronted with original reporting done by somebody else, there are only a few ways to respond. The news crew that has been beaten can either:

1. hurry up and put out a "matcher."

2. get cracking on a "knock down," or

3. stand fast and ignore the whole thing.

In the first scenario, some miserable reporter is ordered to match the original. In that case, it's worth noting, the reporter is not supposed to repeat the scoop, verbatim. The reporter is expected to confirm it first, then pass it along to the reporter's own audience. In that case, of course, the resulting story is certainly not exclusive (because it has already appeared elsewhere) and it is not really new. It's like asking a chef to serve leftovers.

This is usually done only when the original story put out by Newsroom A is so momentous that it would be an insult to readers or viewers or listeners to keep it from them. It is reserved for those things that the audience simply must know. (It also made more sense in the pre-internet era, when audiences were more passive and captive.) Alternatively, the matcher makes sense on a story that has "legs" = that is, one that shows signs of developing. In that case, Newsroom B is not forced to simply match but can play catch-up instead. If the story is big enough (Watergate, steroids in baseball), then there will eventually be plenty of news for all.

Generally, though, reporters hate doing matchers (for fairly obvious reasons) and try to get out of them. Matchers are even more loathsome when the competition has something exclusive or something that only makes sense in a different medium.

In the second case, Newsroom B smells a rat and tries to disprove or discredit the scoop claimed by Newsroom A. To punch holes in a competitor's work can be very gratifying, and reporters who have been "scooped" generally prefer the knockdown to the matcher.

In the third case, Newsroom B decides to "pass" on the story, for any of several reasons. It may be that Newsroom A has embarked on a 19-part series on mine safety or some other heavy, complicated topic, undertaken only for the sake of submitting the series for a prize. If it contains no real news, it can be safely ignored.

In the ACORN case, we have a variant on these dynamics, one that is a product of the new partisan media that has flourished in the Internet age. As I see it, a conservative activist set out to embarrass ACORN (which is a perfectly appropriate activity for a conservative activist to do). The chosen technique was a "gotcha" video. After banging on enough doors in a huge, nationwide organization, the activist found some rotten apples. (Shocking.)

The conservative activist then worked hand in glove with the conservative commentariat (Limbaugh, Hannity, et al) to raise a partisan hue and cry. When real journalists failed to respond, the conservative media police (Malkin, et al) started working the refs, crying foul because the news media would not bite. They claimed that the news media would not match the ACORN story because of their supposed liberal bias. Eventually, some news organizations capitulated and even issued mea culpas.

What's troubling in this scenario is the presumption that anyone with a minicam is entitled to access to the established media. That's not true and never has been. (After all, every time Michael Moore captures some horror on video, the Wall Street Journal does not feel obligated to write a serious straight story about it as if it were news.) In describing the ways that news organizations respond to being scooped, I was referring to how they respond to other news organizations, not to outsiders. If some activist pulls a stunt, or some think tank issues a report, that is not automatically news. Real news organizations respect their audiences by not passing along junk. They report, verify, and weigh things.

That approach is not partisan, it is professional. Outsiders often look at news organizations from afar and infer ideological motives where the real motives are professional.

There is a very good example of a similar case detailed by the highly respected journalist Mark Bowden (of "Black Hawk Down") in the latest Atlantic. He reports on the behind-the-scenes effort by conservative activists to knee-cap Judge Sonia Sotomayor by trying to inject opposition research into the mainstream media.

Call me old-fashioned, but I still believe that what makes a news organization valuable is its skepticism, its fairness, and its independence. Everyone falls short sometimes, but those are the things worth fighting for.

VACCINE CONTROVERSIES

By Chris Daly

Although there is no mention of it in today's Times, other news outlets are reporting that U.S. Health Secretary Kathleen Sebelius testified before Congress on Tuesday that the government expects to have plenty of swine flu vaccine, and to have it ahead of schedule.

For those of us who study the history of journalism, this might be a good occasion to recall the first real controversy ever covered by newspapers in what became the United States. The time was 1721-22. The setting was Boston, then the largest town in the English colonies of North America. The issue was the response to smallpox, a deadly and gruesome disease.

At the time, Boston had two competing weekly newspapers (the first city in the New World to have competing papers), and a third was launched just as the smallpox crisis hit. The new paper, the New-England Courant, was published and printed by James Franklin, who also employed his younger brother Ben as an apprentice.

The ensuing, noisy public debate is a fascinating example of a public health debate that eventually had implications for journalism, politics, the clergy, and medicine. A good introduction to the complicated issues is available here from the Harvard University Library, which has done a commendable job in opening the many documents in its possession. Similar materials are available here from the Digital Book Index.

Of note is a pamphlet on smallpox written by Ben Franklin in 1759, after he had retired from the printing and newspaper business to devote himself to scientific inquiry and public affairs. In the pamphlet, Franklin writes approvingly of innoculation against smallpox -- exactly opposite the position taken by his brother 38 years earlier -- evidence, perhaps, of an open mind.