Friday Afternoon News Dumps: Myth or Reality?

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Here is Jeremiah Goulka on the Obama administration’s announcement last week that the Keystone XL pipeline won’t increase greenhouse gas emissions:

Chances are that you missed the State Department releasing the final environmental review of the Keystone XL pipeline last week. You were meant to: it came out on 4pm on the Friday before Super Bowl Sunday. The mainstream media only had a few moments to glance at the executive summary—the report itself is an un-skimmable eleven volumes long—before the news cycle moved onto the big game.

I’m just curious: does anyone really believe this anymore? I’m talking about the infamous Friday afternoon news dump. It’s an article of faith that bad news is always released on Friday afternoon, where it will get lost in the weekend news cycle, but isn’t the evidence pretty strong that this doesn’t work? Maybe for small stuff it does, but it sure doesn’t seem to be the case for anything that people would otherwise care about. The Keystone XL report is a pretty good example. It seems to me that it got about as much attention as it was ever likely to get no matter when it was released.

I think some enterprising graduate student needs to write a dissertation about this. Create a metric that predicts how much attention a piece of news “deserves”—we can call it DQ—and then check to see if news dumps on Friday underperform the DQ metric over, say, the next 30 days. Let’s find out if this is myth or reality.

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THE FACTS SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES.

At least we hope they will, because that’s our approach to raising the $350,000 in online donations we need right now—during our high-stakes December fundraising push.

It’s the most important month of the year for our fundraising, with upward of 15 percent of our annual online total coming in during the final week—and there’s a lot to say about why Mother Jones’ journalism, and thus hitting that big number, matters tremendously right now.

But you told us fundraising is annoying—with the gimmicks, overwrought tone, manipulative language, and sheer volume of urgent URGENT URGENT!!! content we’re all bombarded with. It sure can be.

So we’re going to try making this as un-annoying as possible. In “Let the Facts Speak for Themselves” we give it our best shot, answering three questions that most any fundraising should try to speak to: Why us, why now, why does it matter?

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