How much coverage are you worth?

November 4, 2022 3:56 AM

To highlight the scale of the [missing white woman syndrome] problem, [Columbia Journalism Review] has developed a tool to test your own newsworthiness. By entering basic demographic data (none of which is saved by CJR) at areyoupressworthy.com, you can calculate your own worth, according to the American press.
posted by Etrigan (55 comments total)

"Where do you live?" = in Canada, so not on the list at all. Yeah, that tracks.
posted by Mogur at 3:59 AM on November 4, 2022 [6 favorites]

I really like that this ends with photos of people whose disappearance has been unreported, and a hotline to call if you have any information. It's heartbreaking to think of their families.
posted by basalganglia at 4:06 AM on November 4, 2022 [27 favorites]

My disappearance would only be covered by 17 news outlets (max is 128) because I'm too old and live in suburbia. I'm only covered at all because I'm a white woman. The really sad part is that they show the faces of some missing people who had zero news stories about them. And they were all older black and brown people.
posted by ceejaytee at 4:07 AM on November 4, 2022 [4 favorites]

Also, I'm surprised the term "missing white woman syndrome" was only coined in 2004 by the late, great Gwen Ifill. I remember the Chandra Levy case absolutely swamping the newspapers in 2001, a year when per Wikipedia there were 240 *other* murders in DC. But I bet those were Black and brown people, not an attractive white twentysomething living in Dupont Circle and having an affair with a Congressman.
posted by basalganglia at 4:17 AM on November 4, 2022 [7 favorites]

If I disappeared, I’d only be the subject of 16 news stories. :( It’s particularly hurtful that NPR would be unlikely to cover my disappearance - I love NPR! Not mutual, I guess.
posted by Mr. Excellent at 4:28 AM on November 4, 2022 [3 favorites]

6... a combination of being older and non-binary (despite being urban and white). if i change gender to female (21) or male (16) there's quite a difference.
posted by kokaku at 4:39 AM on November 4, 2022 [2 favorites]

Looking at it another way, if I chose to disappear and start a new life tomorrow, it wouldn't attract any attention, so I have that going for me.
posted by briank at 4:45 AM on November 4, 2022 [37 favorites]

11, including The New York Times, which feels like a reeeaaal stretch.
posted by box at 4:49 AM on November 4, 2022 [5 favorites]

Wow, very impactful design.
posted by latkes at 4:57 AM on November 4, 2022 [4 favorites]

Tried it and--why would Orlando outlets report on me? I don't live anywhere near Orlando, is that America's biggest true crime market?

I honestly would not want every news station reporting if I was missing, 24/7 coverage has to be traumatic for the families.
posted by kingdead at 5:40 AM on November 4, 2022 [2 favorites]

I guess I'm too old now for Nancy Grace to moralize about how my own choices got me kidnapped 😔

My mother will never know I'm gone.
posted by phunniemee at 5:46 AM on November 4, 2022 [8 favorites]

Tried it and--why would Orlando outlets report on me? I don't live anywhere near Orlando, is that America's biggest true crime market?

I had a similar geographic challenge – Arizona is where my iCloud private relay places me, so I saw a bunch of Arizona media pop up, and I don't live in Arizona.

But other than that blip that took me out of it, I agree, this was very powerful.
posted by hijinx at 5:48 AM on November 4, 2022

If you went missing, the American news media wouldn’t give your story much coverage.

My plan is working!
posted by chavenet at 5:51 AM on November 4, 2022 [4 favorites]

Look at briank with his glass half full there. If life hands you lemons etc.

Jokes aside, this is a very effective way to present something that would otherwise be a graph or table that's easy to skip over in a story.
posted by Harald74 at 5:52 AM on November 4, 2022 [3 favorites]

Low news coverage for me. I obviously should have disappeared when I was younger.

Still, 24% of people would hear about me.

As for NPR (WHYY), I used to live in Delaware, and I noticed that they only covered news from Delaware during fund drives. Then there were a few years of Delaware coverage, and now they're back to ignoring Delaware.
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 5:58 AM on November 4, 2022 [2 favorites]

Because of the splash that this particular CJR piece is making -- and adjacent work it's based on -- I'm having a bit of trouble wading through search results to get at underlying assumptions: Does more news coverage help? Are people who go missing safer when they are better covered? Up to what level of coverage? Is there a point where the helpfulness, if any, has diminishing returns and the coverage is just revenue generation?
posted by majick at 6:48 AM on November 4, 2022 [4 favorites]

basalganglia: I remember the Chandra Levy case absolutely swamping the newspapers in 2001

The only person happier than Osama Bin Laden about the 9/11 attacks was Gary Condit.
posted by dr_dank at 6:48 AM on November 4, 2022 [9 favorites]

6... a combination of being older and non-binary (despite being urban and white). if i change gender to female (21) or male (16) there's quite a difference.

Changing my gender from "non-binary" to "female" changed the number from 10 to 35. Good thing I'm not out of the closet!
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 6:50 AM on November 4, 2022 [5 favorites]

Tried it and--why would Orlando outlets report on me? I don't live anywhere near Orlando, is that America's biggest true crime market?

Purely from a 20/20 or Dateline perspective, and assuming no time limit on coverage - perhaps Orlando would be determined by investigators to be where your phone last pinged a cell tower, or God forbid, where your remains were found by highway maintenance workers 14 months later.
posted by thecincinnatikid at 6:52 AM on November 4, 2022

5 articles. 0.67% of America. At least I probably wouldn’t end up in a true crime book.
posted by brook horse at 6:54 AM on November 4, 2022 [2 favorites]

I'm having a bit of trouble wading through search results to get at underlying assumptions: Does more news coverage help?

I actually didn't read this as an assumption of the piece. We can imagine scenarios where news coverage helps find a missing person, but I don't think that's an assumption they're making. I also imagine this would be very hard to construct good data for; if more affluent white women are found, is it because of press coverage, because the police care more, the relationship to the perpetrator, some combination of all these?

Bias in news reporting is in itself interesting, though. And we can certainly add interpretations to it, w.r.t. who we care about, what types of crimes serve the right types of narratives or pique prurient interest, etc.
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 6:57 AM on November 4, 2022 [1 favorite]

Because of the splash that this particular CJR piece is making -- and adjacent work it's based on -- I'm having a bit of trouble wading through search results to get at underlying assumptions: Does more news coverage help? Are people who go missing safer when they are better covered?

I only get 11, but I get the NY Times? And TV news from all over the state? I'm pretty happy with that. And the list of ones that won't cover me is a littany of mostly 'who cares!' (sorry if you work for the NY Post, Buzzfeed, Huffpost, Forbes, Yahoo News! or whatever).


Also, I don't think news coverage helps recover people.
posted by The_Vegetables at 7:29 AM on November 4, 2022

It also didn't ask any questions about economic status, which in the world of Dateline episodes about deaths of rich old guys in SoCal is kind of odd.
posted by The_Vegetables at 7:31 AM on November 4, 2022 [5 favorites]

I made the Washington Post! But I have to wonder if there is another variable they are leaving out; net worth. Rich people don’t go missing very often but when they do it seems to get a lot of coverage.
posted by TedW at 7:33 AM on November 4, 2022 [5 favorites]

5 articles. FIVE!?!

"The press would barely cover your story. "

These five will probably be in the local free Indian "papers" that I pick up regularly at Patel Brothers.
posted by indianbadger1 at 8:06 AM on November 4, 2022 [6 favorites]

14. You’d think a famous philosopher going missing would warrant more coverage…
posted by wittgenstein at 8:23 AM on November 4, 2022 [8 favorites]

> These five will probably be in the local free Indian "papers" that I pick up regularly at Patel Brothers.

Heh. Replace with "Korean" and "small Korean grocery about to be driven out of business by H-Mart" for me.
posted by research monkey at 8:27 AM on November 4, 2022 [5 favorites]

Comedian Patrice O'Neal had a memorable bit about this
posted by olopua at 8:30 AM on November 4, 2022

and they don't even give an option for transgender. If they did, I'm pretty sure the number would be "any and all stories would be about relatives saying if you were just normal they know you'd have been fine and/or TERFs saying you deserved it".

Fuck, they don't even report much on our murders.
posted by mephron at 8:53 AM on November 4, 2022 [11 favorites]

21 stories. woulda been a lot more were I in my 20s as I am a white chick, but now old. quelle domage!
posted by supermedusa at 9:00 AM on November 4, 2022 [3 favorites]

4. Oof.
posted by riverlife at 9:24 AM on November 4, 2022 [4 favorites]

16, and unsurprised because my career coach and one of my past HR business partners were very lucid on this topic re: my own categories. And there is nothing more unholy than the fiendish glee of an HR business partner realizing they're helping you fire someone who has the same categories because "you'll cancel out his objections if it goes to BOLI."

This kind of framing provokes a sort of rivalrous thinking that always turns up in our current political era, where we tend toward quantification, and then into a scarcity mindset, and then go full crab.

They don't mean to do this, but the framing leads to "How can we recalibrate the commodification of human worth instead of eliminate it" because it doesn't examine the commodification of human worth to begin with, just maintains that we can better manage and equalize it.

Also, "test your own newsworthiness" is god awful. Sorry, don't care what their intentions are, don't care if it's "realistic," they're journalists not passive bystanders, so they need to take responsibility for their language here. This is not a matter of "how newsworthy I am," this is a matter of how unimportant most people are to the market.

It's just another example of neoliberalism spawning a problem (commodification of news breeds inequality by introducing the market-worthiness of an individual or topic to coverage choices), then adding more plumbing, "management" and duct tape to obscure the problem, which is that neoliberalism's foundational conception of humans is tied up in their market utility, and its baseline approach to keeping society stable in the face of that is to treat justice as a rivalrous resource we all have to compete for.
posted by mph at 9:25 AM on November 4, 2022 [5 favorites]

14.

Orlando for me, too?
posted by doctornemo at 9:36 AM on November 4, 2022 [1 favorite]

16. I'm actually surprised it's that high. I attribute it to being white.
posted by Chuffy at 9:38 AM on November 4, 2022 [1 favorite]

they're journalists not passive bystanders,

They're journalists whose beat is journalism, and this is aimed at the people who are deciding on these levels of coverage, not as a justification of it or an exhortation for non-journalists to... I don't know, get whiter and womaner if they get abducted?
posted by Etrigan at 9:39 AM on November 4, 2022 [3 favorites]

13. Buffalo and Philly? I'm 400 miles away from them, and have never been to either.
posted by Marky at 9:40 AM on November 4, 2022

The site kept prodding me to keep my phone vertical like some sort of modern day charm finishing school. Sigh.

Oh yeah, and my score dropped from 15 to 5 when I went from female to nonbinary. No transgender options.

But hey, the next town over apparently cares about me? Thanks, you guys rock!
posted by Jacen at 9:45 AM on November 4, 2022

16. I'm actually surprised it's that high. I attribute it to being white.

When I took it, being white was annotated as a negative factor, perhaps in combination with other categories in my profile. Don’t remember the order they asked.
posted by mph at 9:48 AM on November 4, 2022

Changing my gender from "non-binary" to "female" changed the number from 10 to 35. Good thing I'm not out of the closet!

yeah, the non-binary thing is interesting in particular and I'd like to dig more into the numbers they report there. (Mine are identical to yours, fwiw.) I gotta say, I heavily suspect that the white woman effect is limited specifically to women who hit a certain threshold of fuckable: bet you that if you estimated something like weight or conformity to gender norms, the likelihood of coverage drops right off the map too.

I went and looked at NAMUS because I'm curious. I don't see anything there that tracks missing persons as specifically nonbinary. There's an "other" option on sex for missing persons, but checking it to look at the database returns only three cases, all of which have very little information; "unsure" only adds one more. There's no separate tracking of gender. So where are those numbers coming from?

When I run the test again, changing my gender to male away from nonbinary raises the score again: from 10 (nb) to 27 (male) to 35 (female). I was wondering if they'd tried to just average the difference, but apparently not. Now I'm even more curious.
posted by sciatrix at 9:51 AM on November 4, 2022 [5 favorites]

When COVID was new, and it became clear that Trump and Kushner were deliberately going to let blue staters die, I told my friends that if I did, they'd better throw my remains on the steps of the White House. Now I realize that it wouldn't have moved the media's needle too much, because I am not young enough. It didn't when two white men died by suicide to protest climate inaction. Yet it did when Heather Heyer was murdered; it did when Ashli Babbitt got what she asked for. Although the stories appealed to very different people, the impulse was the same.

Edgar Allan Poe summed it up: "the death of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world." The media accepts its favored categories, youth and whiteness, as metonymic for "beautiful," and makes the story pay. An ugly business -- the only solution I see is for different voices to be in charge of the media, and how we get there from here, I won't pretend to know.
posted by Countess Elena at 9:53 AM on November 4, 2022 [5 favorites]

"An ugly business -- the only solution I see is for different voices to be in charge of the media ..."

Where "different voices" and "in charge" probably need to be thought about very flexibly.

Broadly, media is locked in a relationship with its readership that is driven by its ownership. One of the reasons I have "good, let it burn" moments over the Twitter situation is that it has contributed to a tightening of the feedback loop for journalists in a negative way. I remember being a young reporter who was scolded for suggesting our little small-town biweekly do "people on the street" coverage, but Twitter is routinely used to pad out news coverage today. Why the hell was that tweet from that person embedded to help make the point? No idea, but I feel safe betting it's a combination of confirming priors, pithiness, and The Ratio.

The "let it burn" moments pass because I know if it's not Twitter feeding it, the dynamic will find somewhere new to draw energy from once that thing gets around to making it easy to embed Toots, Bleets, Honks, or Hollers on a web page, and easy to discern the relative safety of passing them along/off as vox populi.

Anyhow, the reporters, managing editors, executive editors, and EiCs all have a cumulative influence, but they're still balancing whatever formal "good" they're doing with the market viability of their efforts. That's the water they're all swimming in. If we're going to keep swimming in that water, those people, and even the owners, are effectively interchangeable no matter how we slice them up or shuffle them in and out, and real change will remain out of reach.
posted by mph at 10:05 AM on November 4, 2022 [3 favorites]

American tv news has a lot to answer for.
posted by doctornemo at 10:44 AM on November 4, 2022 [3 favorites]

I gotta say, I heavily suspect that the white woman effect is limited specifically to women who hit a certain threshold of fuckable: bet you that if you estimated something like weight or conformity to gender norms, the likelihood of coverage drops right off the map too.

Age is something of a proxy for that.

While my own results as a youngish-middle-aged white woman aren't great, my black nonbinary "twin" gets...2. Ouch.
posted by praemunire at 10:46 AM on November 4, 2022 [1 favorite]

On the subject of when dead white "girls" (young women) who don't merit press attention, I recommend the movie Vengeance. Review (Dead White Girl is a placeholder title for the podcast B.J. Novak's character is making in the film.)
posted by ASCII Costanza head at 11:49 AM on November 4, 2022 [2 favorites]

Having watched a local family's struggle to get their kid's (16, white, female) disappearance in any media after an original couple of pieces, I found the tool's estimate of my own stories (14) to be ludicrously high. Regional effects must be huge here, because these folks have been calling reporters and police trying to get any interest in her, to basically silence.
posted by mittens at 12:25 PM on November 4, 2022 [5 favorites]

Eh, it tells me I'm more newsworthy at 43 than my 6-year-old (white) daughter. I'm not sure about that.
posted by catesbie at 12:47 PM on November 4, 2022 [1 favorite]

On the subject of when dead white "girls" (young women) who don't merit press attention, I recommend the movie Vengeance.

Absolutely. It went places I genuinely didn't expect. The first 10-15 mins are... not great, but then it settles in.

I'm a middle-aged white woman in Colorado's second largest city. 17 stories. Which absolutely feels a bit high.

And I wonder, too, what other factors would most affect the numbers. For example, there's Suzanne Morphew of Salida, Colorado, who disappeared two and a half years ago and still gets coverage around here. She's 49, so I suspect that normally she'd have similar numbers to mine according to this calculator, but her story has gotten national coverage (and perhaps even international?) because she has more compelling factors, at least in journalistic terms.

She's a mother of two, she's photogenic and athletic, she disappeared on Mother's Day while going for a bike ride, her disappearance was reported by a neighbor and not her husband, Suzanne's equally photogenic husband has a shaky alibi and has since been charged with her murder, her two absurdly photogenic daughters have steadfastly sided with their father, there was a huge snowstorm around the time of her disappearance so any evidence was quickly muddled and she could literally be anywhere, there are some juicy stories of infidelity/motive, and on and on.

But it's not just news stories: Her case has a huge response from law enforcement. From a recent story on our local news: "The sheriff's office said it worked with law enforcement partners to execute over 135 search warrants statewide and interview more than 400 people in multiple states. The law enforcement teams looked into more than 1,400 tips." As a result, there's a news/law enforcement ouroboros, at least until they find out what exactly happened to her.
posted by mochapickle at 12:49 PM on November 4, 2022 [1 favorite]

I expect there are random factors, like how much other new was there that day. How long has it been since the most recent other disappearance?
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 1:35 PM on November 4, 2022

Middle age white guy in Minneapolis appears to be worth 24, but I think it would be higher if my name was included.

How many points do we deduct for that web design though? Oof.
posted by Sphinx at 3:09 PM on November 4, 2022 [1 favorite]

Hopefully I'd get my initial 17 press pieces out before the local cops looked back a few decades and decided to start misgendering me.
posted by tigrrrlily at 3:46 PM on November 4, 2022 [2 favorites]

I had a similar geographic challenge – Arizona is where my iCloud private relay places me, so I saw a bunch of Arizona media pop up, and I don't live in Arizona.
Same thing--it seems to place me in Texas, with one exception. They think I'd get covered by PennLive. Which makes no sense.
But I love the exercise, even if I'm at a dismal 11, probably because I'm old.
posted by etaoin at 4:34 PM on November 4, 2022 [1 favorite]

Hah, I got PennLive, too, even though I also don't live in or near PA. Maybe they just love missing persons stories. (FWIW I only rated 4 articles.)
posted by Conrad Cornelius o'Donald o'Dell at 7:14 PM on November 4, 2022

mph, you got me thinking--I was mad that I didn't get more stories than the "young, beautiful white girl" but 99 percent of the time she's not around to enjoy the attention, is she? What a stupid thing to be envious about...
posted by kingdead at 8:13 PM on November 4, 2022 [2 favorites]

In Australia, in a wealthy suburb called Claremont, three young white women (ages 18, 23 and 27) disappeared between 1996–1997 (Claremont Serial Killer, a man has since been convicted of murdering two of the women, the third body was never found.)

The woman who was from a working class background, and who was also fatter than the other two women, got considerably less media coverage.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 9:36 AM on November 5, 2022

I'm dubious.

Not that I'd only be in 13 news stories if I disappeared. I'm a white woman in a small/medium city, but I'm 55. But I'm very doubtful that the New York Times would cover my disappearance and my city's newspaper would not, or that websites and TV stations in other cities would, but none in my own city would.

(I'm somewhat comforted that because I worked in TV in this market in my prior career, and know many of the anchors and have appeared on local stations because of my current career, I have a media advantage that the Columbia Journalism Review would not know about. But one should not need those advantages for the media to care.)
posted by The Wrong Kind of Cheese at 5:58 PM on November 5, 2022