When Los Angeles Times publisher Mark Willes recently announced that he was going to grade his editors and reporters on the number of quotes from women and minorities that they included in their stories, not everyone reacted in the proper spirit. If any editor told him to add quotes to a story simply to achieve an appropriate gender/race/ethnicity mix, "I would tell that editor to go to hell," one reporter told the publisher.
Some observers have misunderstood this remark to mean that the reporter objected to the spirit of the enterprise, that his fixation on facts and commentary directly relevant to a story had blinded him to the larger social function, the contribution to inclusive diversity, that newspaper articles can serve. Others surmised that some quote suppliers, laboring under the misapprehension that their remarks were sought for their intrinsic value, might be displeased to find they were filling a demographically labeled box.
But these critics are missing the real point. What bothered the reporter--and the many others at the Times who voiced similar concerns--is surely the fear that doing full justice to the demographic multidimensionality of quotees would absorb many scarce column inches. After all, when it comes to identifying people, what's in a name, as Shakespeare so presciently remarked? President Clinton has gotten scant credit for appointing Ambassador Bill Richardson to high office despite his maternal Hispanicity. We can't all be lucky enough to be named Geraldo Rivera.
Consider, for example, a recent front-page article in the L.A. Times describing the rise of Charlotte, N.C., to second-largest banking center in America. Variously cited are a bunch of local businessmen, bankers, and urban experts with names like Carroll Gray, Hugh McCall, and Edward Crutchfield. On the face of it, only one citee, a bank official named Carlos Evans, might score a publisher's point. Yet who knows what mosaic of ethnicities, religious affiliations and migratory impulses might be hidden behind a name such as Winchell Cross (as we shall dub one of the cited experts for purposes of illustration)? Full justice might, one imagines, require a reporter to write: " 'Most banks are run by faceless MBAs,' said Winchell Cross, director of the Urban Research Center, an Anglo-Franco-Irish-Italo-nonevangelical-Protestant-with-Catholic-antecedents-American whose predominantly Chinese wife has some Tatar and Burmese ancestry."
Well, obviously that's not going to work. And it's certainly not going to fit on a business card. What is needed is a compact notation that will allow full and precise display to the unique parameters of each and every giver of good quote.
A new software package QUOTA QUOTE&tm; provides the solution. Easily installed into any newspaper, magazine or personal word processing system, it allows reporters and their editors to describe respondents by assigning appropriate values to the superscripts and subscripts in the following expression (note that the coded categories are meant to be illustrative not definitive, so no offense should be inferred from the failure to specify the appropriate values for every reader):
NameA,C,Cs,F,G,O,P,R,Ry,S,Sp
where the superscripts are specified as follows:
A denotes age (1 = one of the nation's children; 2 = teenager; 3 = Gen-X; 4 = aging boomer/soccer mom; 5 = older worker; 6 = senior citizen; 7 = frail elderly; 8 = death bed)
C denotes color (absent sunning) (1 = black; 2 = tan; 3 = yellow; 4 = white)
Cs denotes color of spouse (defined as for C)
F denotes food preferences (1 = omnivore; 2 = vegetarian; 3 = vegan; 4 = kosher; 5 = lactose intolerant, etc.)
G denotes gender (1 = female; 2 = male; 3 = transgendered)
O denotes sexual orientation (1 = straight; 2 = gay or lesbian; 3 = bi; 4 = other)
P denotes political orientation (1 = Democrat, old; 2 = Democrat, new; 3 = Republican, Rockefeller; 4 = Republican, Reaganite; 5 = Republican, religious right; 6 = Republican, Buchananite; 7 = libertarian; 8 = nonaligned)
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