A couple of weeks ago, our B&G Report published a series of answers to the question: “What should members of the press know in order to more effectively cover their governments?"
We published a post about it on LinkedIn, and received a comment from a friend, a journalist whose opinion and work we respect enormously. He wrote “Always find the effective date of a new rule or law. It may not be when you expect.”
Good council, and it set us to thinking about the difficulties we confront on a regular basis hunting for the date on many of the documents we use as sources. At least with new laws, as our friend mentioned, this is findable information. Unfortunately, with reports, studies, data and more, it’s often nearly impossible to figure out when it was written. That’s a problem for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that the world of state and local government is forever changing, and re-using old information and thinking that it’s current can lead to all kinds of mistakes.
Just the other day we came across a powerful report published by a well-known consulting firm (though we’re not going to name any names here) and after reading it thoroughly, searching everyplace for a date of publication we nearly decided not to use it at all. Then it struck us that we could possibly find a press release about its publication. We found one and – lo! – there was the date we needed. Turned out it was way out of date.
Covid-19 only amplified this issue, as nearly everything about the fiscal status of governments in the depths of the pandemic is no longer true. As a result, reports using pandemic-era based data can easily be misleading, unless the reader knows that was the time period during which they were issued and can take that into account.
And now time for a confession – and a little news about this website. From its inception, we have neglected to put dates on pretty much anything – with the single exception of our B&G Weekly Management News Selection – including our B&G Reports and Guest Columns.
There was really no good reason we didn’t. Now, inspired by our reflections as we decided to write this B&G Report, we’ll be making a change to that sometime in the next month or so, and will be adding dates to the most of the material we publish, in hopes that it will make it more useful to our readers (especially those who find a particular item on Google or some other search engine, and have no idea when it was actually published).
Why aren’t dates included on all research? We can only speculate that some authors aren’t eager for their work to appear to be out of date (even when it genuinely is) and so can cultivate its use into the future, by omitting this important piece of information.
Yet another somewhat scurrilous reason that’s been suggested is that some papers are published by technical associations, who make their profit by selling access to papers. The idea is that when researchers can’t tell when a paper is published, they buy it, only to discover subsequently that it’s out of date.
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