Category Archives: Media IQ Trainwrecks

Geographic Information Quality Boo boos

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From Twitter we learn that CNN is reporting that NATO is combing Tripoli looking for Colonel Gadaffi (or any of the other variant spellings of that name).

Unfortunately, if CNN are to be believed, NATO has just invaded another country to find the errant Colonel (Libya is a little further to the left people…)

Of course, this is not the first time that CNN or other media outlets have made errors with geography. Here’s the CNN map showing the location of the Queensland flooding in Australia earlier this year:

And of course, the Gawker.com took great pleasure in reporting on how Google presented the Russian invasion of the former Soviet Republic of Georgia as being an attack on some good ol’ boys in the Deep South of the United States of America (at least according to their maps)

 

A great resource for information on mapping and cartographical errors is The Map Room Blog

Google maps inaccuracies

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We spotted this on Gawker.com. From my experience using Google Maps, it rings true (I recently was sent 15 miles out of my way on a trip in rural Ireland).

It seems that Google Maps has plotted the location of a tourist attraction in New Jersey right at the end of a driveway to a private residence. So, on the 4th of July weekend, the owners of the property had to fend off increasingly irate visitors who were looking for the lake and wound up in a private driveway.

So, the data is inaccurate and of poor quality. Google have responded to their error and replotted the location of the tourist area at the lake? Not yet, according to the story on Gawker.

Perhaps they should have checked their listings twice?

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The Irish Sunday Independent reports this past weekend that the Irish State Broadcaster RTE is facing legal action from its erstwhile privately owned competitor TV3  arising from what are described as “significant and egregious” errors in the listings published for TV3’s programmes over the Christmas period in the RTE owned listing’s magazine “The RTE Guide”. The errors affect listings over the core Christmas period and also the time of one movie which is due to be broadcast tonight at 9pm but which is listed incorrectly in the Guide.

In a wonderful example which highlights the potential downstream cost and revenue implications of poor quality information, TV3 says the error is so serious that it could have a fundamental impact on its Christmas viewing figures.

And, in TV-land, viewing figures translate into hard-to-come-by-in-a-recession advertising revenues.

TV3 have asked for RTE to pulp all copies of the RTE Guide still in shops and to replace them with reprints which show the correct listings. Failing this, they have asked RTE to give prime-time advertising coverage on TV and radio to TV3 programmes over the Festive Season, which would have the effect of reducing the prime-time advertising slots which RTE would have already sold over Christmas, hitting RTE’s revenue streams as well.

RTE, for their part, blame a 3rd party supplier for the errors.

Of course, this writer’s thoughts are with the ultimate information consumers here… the viewing public. If my house as a teenager was anything to go by, the RTE Guide will have been used as the basis for negotiations about who gets to see TV ‘live’ versus programming the video recorder.

A while ago, Daragh O Brien wrote on his blog about the likely rise in Information Quality litigation, particularly as studies have shown that people become more litigious during a recession. This looks like one of those cases and it seems 2010 will be an interesting year for Information Quality management principles in Ireland.

Media trainwrecks (two of two – aka Presentation Quality is everything)

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Again, with thanks to Damien Mulley we present quite possibly the best example of Information Overload in a press release. It appears that an unnamed media organisation in Dublin passed a press release on to Damien (who apart from blogging intensively and organising the Irish Blog Awards amongst other things is also a journalist).

Unfortunately they forgot to turn off ‘track changes’ in Microsoft Word and the published release contained all the drafting edits that had been done to the document since it was created. My eyes hurt me trying to read the scan of the press release that Damien posted on his blog.. if you look closely enough I swear to you that you can see dolphins or a face or something buried in the text.

Why is this a trainwreck? The press release is garbage. The ‘foot in the door’ to news agencies who might cover the event was entirely ineffective. First impressions are important and the quality of information is ultimately affected by the quality of presentation of that information. A general rule of thumb is that if your head hurts trying to figure out what the actual information is in the midst of the ‘noise’ then it’s poor quality.

Update: To cap it all off, Damien makes clear in comments on this blog post that he shouldn’t have received the release in the first place as he is a Technology journalist, not a music journalist. Again, poor quality information contributing to a trainwreck press release being sent to the wrong person (who then put it up on his blog).

Media trainwrecks (one of two)

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Courtesy of Irish uber-blogger and technology journalist Damien Mulley come two excellent examples of poor quality information getting loose.

The first concerns an article published in the Irish Examiner Newspaper. They published a story this week which puported to show that Irish employers were losing millions of euro due to staff members using Social Networking sites like Bebo or Facebook. Mr Mulley found no fewer than five errors in the article, ranging from the fact that the survey they were referencing was a UK survey, and 50% of the respondents were interviewed in one location (which wasn’t in Ireland) to basic errors in mathematics in working out the cost to the Irish economy. As Damien helpfully points out (when he fixed his own factual errors due to miscalculations), that for the Irish Examiner’s figures to make any sense the average salary in Ireland would need to be over €120k a year.

 …take it from me… it’s not.

As Damien’s site is a blog there are some interesting comments which correct his calculations and provide alternate ways of calculating the costs to the Irish economy of Social Networking. None of them reach the same conclusions as the Irish Examiner.

 The second example will follow in the next post.