I’ve heard from several people recently who’ve had trouble navigating to The Kansas City Star’s Midwest Voices blog. Refers with many Opinion section columns promote voices.kansascity.com as a place for readers to share their thoughts.
One confusion: Some users added “www.” to the beginning of the address creating a URL that doesn’t exist.
The address usually comes at the end of a sentence, which is often punctuated with a terminal period. Another problem comes when some people type that dot as part of the address, which also creates a nonexistent Web address.
My preference is that sentences ending with any Web address should simply omit the final period. Similarly, when addresses are too long for a single line, they should break to the next without a hyphen. Avoiding confusion is more important than the rules of punctuation.
Researching readership
Last week, a reader asked about the negative feedback on the new FYI Weekend/Preview that I wrote about in my last column:
“Why would The Star stick with something that’s so widely disliked?” he wondered.
That brings up two major points:
1. All readers’ representatives/ombudsmen/public editors hear vastly more complaints than compliments. That’s just the nature of the job and it’s implicit in the solicitation for comment.
2. Most importantly, solicited feedback like this is the polar opposite of scientifically valid research. The people who contact me are called a “self-selected cohort.” Real research demands a group of respondents chosen randomly.
In the case of the FYI/Preview combo, I’ve had some more negative feedback since that last column but I’ve also had some readers saying that they do like it.
“I really did enjoy it,” said a caller last week. “And I didn’t have any problems finding anything in it. I don’t know why people didn’t like it.”
By the way, I hear one retort all the time when I mention that The Star conducts polls of its readers through MORI Research: “Well, nobody called me with a survey.” That’s certainly true for most people.
The Star’s readership is over a million people every week, and all those people obviously aren’t all surveyed individually. Instead, a representative group is studied, and the results extrapolated.
I know there are lots of critics to this kind of research, but MORI’s results tend to be extremely consistent from year to year, even though it surveys completely different people every time.
To professional researchers, that’s considered a very good indication that the numbers are valid and give a picture of the wider public’s opinion.
