You don't have street cred if you can't do the math
Lost in Seattle Weekly's dustup with Real Change were a few easy-to-calculate facts.
The first we learned that Seattle Weekly was taking a hard look at Real Change – the non-profit newspaper by, about, and in support of the homeless – was from Tim Harris, the founder and executive director. Tim's accustomed to pretty glowing coverage, and he heard Seattle Weekly was sniffing for dirt. So he went off on them on his personal blog (you'll have to pardon his french, or not) before the article was even published in Seattle Weekly. This sort of prescient spin is not usually recommended. In one of its blogs, Seattle Weekly fired back, still before an article was even published, talking about how an article hadn't even been published and they were already getting letters to the editor about how bad the article that hadn't been published was.
Pretty amusing. So then the article is published, about how an unknown number of Real Change street vendors aren't actually homeless though many people assume they are. It's balanced and informative. We'll never know how Harris' preemptive spin helped shape the article – there's no way it didn't. If I was the editor, I'd have made extra damn sure there weren't any problems with it, that it was factually ironclad and fair.
But there was a hole in the article that I don't think would have gotten by me. No one did the math, or at least no one shared any math with readers. Harris didn't, either. Seattle Weekly counted the number of words in Harris' blog blast and reported that in the story about Real Change, but it didn't report the numbers that really matter. How can you have an intelligent conversation about whether people are making too much money – that's ultimately what this is about – when you don't know how much they're making?
Let's do the math! Take the case of Seller Joe. Every week, he sells exactly 500 copies of Real Change for $1 each. He's in their elite 300 Club. He has few peers. Harris claims there are only a handful of vendors who are this successful.
And how successful Seller Joe is! Five hundred papers times 65 cents (his profit after buying the papers from Real Change) is $325. But since he gets to keep his same spot because of his success and sees the same people every week, let's allow for quite a few really nice folks over-paying and particularly good sales weeks and call it $400 a week profit.
Now let's say that Seller Joe sells 52 weeks a year, no vacation. (He works hard for his money.) That's an annual income of $20,800.
The poverty level for a single person, as defined in a Seattle Post-Intelligencer special report two years ago, was $18,620. So Seller Joe is making $2,180 more than poverty level. (Taxes? He don't need to pay no stinkin' taxes.)
There you have it. Seller Joe's not even officially poor. Although admittedly many Real Change vendors probably are poor, in that they don't sell as many paper as he.
This is the sort of factual information that can help people make up their own minds.
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Comments:
Posted Wed, Apr 11, 11:45 p.m. inappropriate
I'm a bit biased having written for Chuck Taylor at the Weekly before New Times acquired it.
Posted Thu, Apr 12, 7:09 a.m. inappropriate
Not "Officially Poor"?: As anyone in business can tell you, the top end sales potential that's possible is rarely achieved. If you want to go down that path at all -- in the name of "good journalism" -- the coverage should have included the statistics on how many Real Change vendors achieve that level - not speculation. More to the point, the standard of living at $18,620 to $20,800 can hardly be construed as living the high life while sticking it to The Man. Not "officially poor"? How would you describe it if it was you and your family?
Posted Thu, Apr 12, 8:03 a.m. inappropriate
RE: Not "Officially Poor"?: I hope you didn't misinterpret my observation, that a person selling Real Change might not be officially poor, as outrage.
Posted Thu, Apr 12, 9:03 a.m. inappropriate
No new editing: Thanks for the perspective, Chuck. For the record, the only thing we did to Huan's piece following Harris's blog post was add a reference to that post.
Posted Thu, Apr 12, 10:06 a.m. inappropriate
Good Point, but You're Still Missing the Big One: The premise of the article in the Weekly is that something is wrong with the vendor system at Real Change. It's all well and good to calculate whether someone qualifies as "poor" by calculating their paper sales, but there's so many other aspects to this. The poverty level is woefully inaccurate in calculating actual poverty - it's based on a decades-old formula that even the Census Bureau admits doesn't include enough information. I challenge you to live on just over $20K a year in Seattle and tell me you're not poor.
Most troubling is the sense in the article that some vendors are no longer "deserving" - i.e. poor enough - to sell the paper. Tim Harris' reaction seems to be based on the fear that this kind of skepticism will hurt sales of Real Change, as people start becoming suspicious that their act of charity is helping the wrong people. It's a fair point, and one that also worries me. Charity is a squishy, intangible instinct, and that instinct can be affected greatly by large and small things. I wish the Weekly writer had put more work into his piece, but I also wish he would find some actual real scandals that were actually affecting people's lives on which to report. Going after the Real Change vendors just seems like trying to prosecute a victimless crime - or trying to create a crime scene where none exists.
Posted Thu, Apr 12, 10:51 a.m. inappropriate
RE: No new editing: Mark, the story says Harris' blog post happened "... before this story was even written ..." Which is why I said there's no way the finished product could have been unaffected by his reaction.
Posted Thu, Apr 12, 11:10 a.m. inappropriate
Poor Journalism: Poorly vetted and underreported, the story missed other available detail - on a Web page that, based on the story, the reporter had visited (it includes a chart on RC's half-million budget and shows its payroll soared last year). What the reader is left with is the news that some vendors, who were homeless, now make enough not to be homeless. This is the work product of the vaunted New Times chain that proclaims itself to be devoted to investigative reporting - which this story is not - but in fact worships the easy-to-do trendy, pop-culture pieces. I read the Weekly but I no longer feel I'll miss something if I don't.
Posted Thu, Apr 12, 12:54 p.m. inappropriate
Soaring Payroll: Not So Much: If there's anything that annoys me as much as sensationalist reporting at the expense of our vendors, it's more-radical-than-thou idiots who like to point to the fact that Real Change actually has a budget and pull out the "poverty pimps" label, not that the previous post explicitly went there. There I go jumping the gun again.
There was no "soaring payroll" last year Jackieo. You can look around as much as you like on realchange.wikispaces.com and you won't see that. You might find some new positions added to this year's budget, but that's called "growth."
Maybe that'll be the Weekly's follow-up expose.
Posted Thu, Apr 12, 2:09 p.m. inappropriate
growth is soaring: Actually, look closer and you'll see that's 2006, not this year's budget, in question: compared to 2005, salary costs increased by $55,000, or 17 percent in 2006. That's a good chunk of new cost in a budget whose revenues dropped $1,000 in 06 compared to 05. It's not "growth" when your costs increase but your revenues fall.
Posted Thu, Apr 12, 3:45 p.m. inappropriate
Oh. That.: A halftime Development Associate position became a fulltime Development Director. Two half time reporters went to three-quarters time. Growth. 2006 lost money overall. So far, this looks to me like "when leftists hold a firing squad they stand in a circle" snark. But maybe you can clarify. What's your point?
Posted Thu, Apr 12, 4:01 p.m. inappropriate
Fair and balanced?: Fair and balanced? I don't think so. The article reads to me like a thesis that Hsu formed and then supports with quotes from naive vendors and buyers. What's the story here? That a few Real Change vendors, by staying with the job for years, creating customer relationships, and putting in tons of hours have managed to secure housing, and in a couple cases, earn incomes slightly exceeding the poverty level. this was a chickenshit hit piece by the Weekly which is no longer the reliable and valuable news source it once was. Shame on them! Need I point out that the staff at Crosscut is composed entirely of former Weekly employees?
Posted Sat, Apr 14, 12:36 p.m. inappropriate
My point: is that it's not "growth" when you lose money: Frank Blethen added a lot of bodies to the Times, too, and also lost money. He's about to go to court to prove that it was anything BUT growth...