My class was assigned to write a story about our hometowns, based on U.S. Census figures. I had recently read a two-part feature in my county newspaper that explored the long-standing socioeconomic disparities between whites and blacks in Annapolis, Md. The first installment introduced Annapolis as the nation's leader in per capita population living in public or subsidized housing,
Such a striking statistic seemed ideal for my assignment. Despite hours of playing around with Census and HUD data, I couldn't reconcile the numbers with the story. Even Maryland town-by-town comparisons were fruitless; Annapolis' surrounding Anne Arundel County has only one other incorporated municipality. Comparison between state capitals only, however, revealed that Annapolis did have the second-highest per capita population in public housing, just behind Harrisburg, Penn.
I was still curious as to where the paper had obtained its statistics , so I e-mailed the authors of the piece, both staff writers with names readers recognize. One of them replied that he couldn't think of any documentation of the public housing statistic, but that the assertion had appeared in previous stories in the paper, and that it is frequently referred to by local activists. He e-mailed me again days later to apologize that he had been mistaken: Annapolis had "the greatest amount of subsidized housing per capita in Maryland, not nation-wide." Again he cited no source. As far as I know, the newspaper has not printed a correction.
I've saved the e-mails as a reminder that sometimes, a piece reveals more about the news-gathering operation than its purported subject.
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