Trend stories are anecdotes in search of a generalization

From The Subjects of New York Times Millennial Trend Stories Aren't Actually Millennials by Amanda Hess.

What a fascinating example of how millennials are using innovative technologies to deal with the most basic of human problems. Except that Rebecca Soffer is not a millennial. She’s 37. According to the Times itself, Neil Howe and William Strauss—the men who literally wrote the book on millennials and are credited with coining the term—establish the start of the millennial generation with people born in the year 1982. That means that today, even the eldest millennials are no more than 32 years old. And yet, the Times trend story on millennial mourning quotes Soffer, the 37-year-old founder of online grief resource Modern Loss; her co-founder Gabrielle Birkner (at 34, not a millennial); 35-year-old Modern Loss blogger Melissa Lafsky Wall (not a millennial); and Jason Feifer, the 33-year-old creator of the Tumblr “Selfies at Funerals” (so close, and yet, not a millennial). Also cited is Esther D. Kustanowitz, another contributor to Modern Loss, though the paper doesn’t divulge her age—perhaps because she is in her 40s. All told, the piece quotes more Gen Xers than it does millennials, even when you count the obligatory reference to Girls protagonist Hannah Horvath, who is 25, and made up.

[snip]

When millennial trend stories stick to their self-imposed age limits, they produce annoying stereotypes about a group of 80 million Americans. But when reporters can’t even find enough of us to fill out their pieces, they’re just lying. Trend stories are anecdotes in search of a generalization, and choosing the organizing principle of “millennial” allows the Times to pretend that it’s really reporting on something new. But the demographics that truly inform these pieces are the Times writers themselves. Their stories are about predominantly white, affluent people who live in cities and have a slim degree of social separation from the person interviewing them. I guess “a few rich white people in New York are doing something” isn’t a enough of a hook.

Three great lines in one paragraph: "Trend stories are anecdotes in search of a generalization"; "But the demographics that truly inform these pieces are the Times writers themselves"; and 'I guess “a few rich white people in New York are doing something” isn’t a enough of a hook.'

Return of the echo chamber.

Interesting to contemplate in conjunction with a piece the other day, The U.S. Cities Where the Poor Are Most Segregated From Everyone Else by Richard Florida.

The large metros where the poor are most segregated are in the Midwest and the Northeast. Milwaukee has the highest level, followed by Hartford, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Detroit, New York, Buffalo, Denver, Baltimore, and Memphis. Many of these are Rustbelt metros with large minority populations that have been hit hard by deindustrialization.

History and circumstance powerfully shape the way you see the world. In the Florida report, the environs of NYT reporters (New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Boston, Washington, D.C., etc.) far and away have the highest segregation of the poor. If that is their quotidian experience, then it is easy to see why they project urban pathologies onto the rest of the nation which don't actually share those pathologies. Looking at Florida's map, flyover country and the South have comparatively little poverty segregation. So who knows more about poverty, those who see its conditions and consequences up close (low poverty segregation) or those who only have an abstract awareness because they only it see it from afar (high poverty segregation)?

It is easy, and not inaccurate, to mock NYT reporters for their lack of situational awareness but we are all subject to interpreting our immediate experience as representative of the world at large. It is not so much that we need more knowledge (always true) but that we need more humility about what we think we know.