Journalists beware: local high school students are grading your work. For the first week of May, Mr. Paul Kandell’s third period Beginning Journalism class graded Palo Alto’s local newspapers, the Mercury News and the Daily News, on local coverage. We spent large portions of class time on this activity, and in some cases, we dedicated the whole class period – 50 minutes – to grading the news. Our conclusion? The news isn’t really worth reading.

The Grade the News Project is a project which was suddenly thrust upon us and unrelated to anything we have done or have yet to do. The idea is to grade the local newspapers on local coverage based on the importance of stories, knowledge impact, sources, and gender diversity. However, the grading system itself has flaws, which makes the final grade assigned to the newspaper exceedingly inaccurate and essentially useless.

For example, the grading sheet asks graders to list the number of named sources for each of the stories. The purpose of this section was to ensure that the reporter collected sufficient information to write a balanced story. By excluding sources such as documents, reports, unnamed sources, and indirect quotes, the reporter appears to have been deficient in proper reporting when he or she has, in fact, consulted several sources in the process of writing the article. Documents may provide crucial information which is not available through interviews with sources. Thus, excluding certain sources from the source grading section severely reduces the supposed "grade" of the newspaper by ignoring the fact that sources other than people can be important. The sources section also requires that a sufficiently sourced story should have at least five sources. This was too high of a standard – only 11% of stories from the Daily News and 40% of stories from the Mercury News had five sources. The standard should be lowered to three sources, but the impact of the sources on the story should be included.

The stories which were "sufficiently sourced" often had five trivial statements from five individuals, more like a verbatim quote than a thoughtful response to an interview question. For example, the Daily often quoted people as saying, "Go ahead, do it" and "Yes, I agree." These quotes don’t provide much information to the story and are generally quite useless. Thus, setting the standard by the number of sources is not an accurate way of assessing how well the story is sourced. The quality and importance of the sources to the story must also be factored in to indicate the impact of sources.

The papers were also judged on what type of stories they emphasized. The Mercury News, for example, de-emphasized major fires, accidents, or natural disaster. What can the newspaper do if none of these events have occurred? The Daily News for example, de-emphasized local health issues. However, we did not include stories from other news organizations or the Daily News wire services, which most likely provide information. Therefore, we cannot make a fair judgment of what the newspaper emphasized and de-emphasized based solely on what newspaper staff are able to cover.

The final judgment on the paper was gender diversity of the sources. The Daily scored a miserable female to male ratio of 75/260 while the Mercury scored a somewhat higher score of 260/445. After collecting this data and presenting it to readers, what will they do with it? Should feminists boycott the Daily because it includes so few female sources? I think not. We should also look into what types of stories each newspaper covers and the corresponding female to male ratio. Sometimes, it is not the fault of the newspaper, but of the content the journalist is covering. In politics, for example, a topic which both the Daily and Mercury emphasized, there are more males than females involved. In addition, we should also look for the significance of the statements of the sources – a greater number of male sources do not translate into more important male comments.

Overall, this project was a poor use of class time. Although the point was perhaps to expose us to news and discuss newspapers in a journalism class, the main discussion was about how we shouldn’t read the newspaper. In addition, the results from this survey are inaccurate, and therefore essentially useless. Think about it-what can readers do with knowledge of the quality of the news? Should readers simply stop subscribing to a newspaper which provides low-quality news? The numbers portray little about the actual quality of our local newspapers. (Which newspaper receives a ten for quality anyway?) In the end, we spent an entire week finding out that the newspaper wasn’t worth reading. We wasted a large amount of time in the pursuit of useless data.

At least we got ice cream for our efforts.