"Bus plunge" stories and my thesis

Slate has a fascinating article on the rise and fall of the “bus plunge” genre in the New York Times. Y’know:

Bus Plunge Kills 37 Sikhs

NEW DELHI, Sept. 18 (Reuters)—At least 37 Sikh pilgrims were killed when a passenger bus fell into a ravine at the foot of the Himalayas, it was reported today.

The story, centering on bus plunge and other “stock” stories’ role in plugging gaps in the physical newshole, tickled my abiding interest in typography. I had to do a double-take, though, when I read this passage:

“Solving layout problems with shorts meant newspapers often ran pieces because they fit, not because they burst with ‘news value.’ How random was the selection of Times shorts? The page from March 6, 1959, featuring the ‘15 Africans Die in Bus Plunge’ story quoted above also harbored six other [filler stories]: ‘Queen Sets African Visit,’ ‘Bourguiba Renamed Head,’ ‘Inquiry Costs Top 4 Million,’ ‘Buenos Aires Port Struck,’ ‘Greece Jails Former Nazi,’ and ‘Jakarta Accepts Soviet Aid.’ How many of those stories ran because they were news, and how many ran because makeup editors were working on a jigsaw puzzle against a deadline?”

If you’ve met me in real life, or you’ve been reading my blog for a little while, you’ll know that I’m working on my senior honors thesis, explaining why informal international agreements are sometimes legalized into formal treaties. I want to be quantitative about this, so I’m coding a sample of these informal agreements as the first step in the analysis. Since it’s hard to track down a representative group of all informal international bargains, I’m using a database.

This database is populated by stories about international agreements from the Times. Stories like “Jakarta Accepts Soviet Aid,” for instance.

I guess it’s not too late to include a proviso that the realities of the newspaper business prevent my sample from being truly representative, but these are the kinds of things I’m just not thinking about. I’ll be sure to show this to my thesis advisor, to say the least.

At any rate, the Slate story is a very good read. And it probably won’t screw up your last two months of work.