The end of the 1 million person Rose Parade count?
Looks like, after many years of papers making bogus reports of 1 million attending the Rose Parade, papers are ready to wise up. We at the Pasadena Star News have avoided reporting the figure for almost two decades after an intrepid reporter teamed up with a mathematician to show that the figure is physically impossible to attain in the confines of the parade route. The L.A. Times has also, in the past, figured this out, but has forgotten over time. The L.A. Times memo (via LAObserved)
There are things in the journalism business which we get so consistently wrong that one begins to wonder whether we labor under some error-dooming curse. Consider the endlessly repeated problem of unreliable crowd counts...
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The unreliability of the Rose Parade crowd count has become a legend of its own. For years, Pasadena officials used to annually repeat a crowd count of one million. In the 1980s, a gentleman named Christopher Lee used to write Letters to the Editor taking us to task for repeating that count. In that same era, a reporter from the Pasadena Star News worked with the late Al Hibbs of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory to estimate the maximum possible crowd along the parade route: 512,000 Hibbs reported, "giving every benefit of the doubt to the upper number." In 1991, our former colleague Jesse Katz wrote a page-one story on the folly of crowd counts. Jesse's story even included a handy formula for calculating a maximum-possible crowd size for parades (it works out to about 130,000 people per mile of parade route if they're all standing up, packed tight as sardines the whole way with no room for coolers, chairs or empty spots at the back).
The Times also blogged about reader response to their reports. They show that in 1997, there was one honest crowd estimate from Pasadena:
For a time, all that attention gets results. In 1997, our Rose Parade story (by Frank Clifford) quoted a police spokesperson as estimating that "hundreds of thousands of people" lined the parade route and noted that "parade officials said they abandoned crowd counts after previous attendance figures were criticized as too high." That was the right solution. But memory is fallible, newspaper staffs come and go, and error creeps back in.
Then again in 2003, the Times got it right:
As for the Rose Parade, as a Times story in 2003 reported, "it's almost impossible to come up with accurate estimates of the crowds that pack the route each year. Tournament officials long claimed that 1 million people attended the parade -- a number that researchers at Caltech have said is statistically impossible.
I think all of us in the journalism business appreciate the commentary on memory being fallible, especially as newspapers do not maintain consistent staffs. We might well forget about not using the 1 million person figure ourselves here, were it not for the reminders of our two long-time staffers, reporter Janette Williams, and Public Editor Larry Wilson.
The one last step to the end of this figure is still the biggest one though: The Associated Press, which reported the figure this year, needs to wise up, since most of the papers in the country that get a news report about the parade will get it from them.
UNDER THE DOME
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| Pasadena -- news, politics and gossip. Send tips, rumors, rants to Dan Abendschein dan.abendschein@sgvn.com. |
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