JmcQ

The current issue of Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly is out. The lead article alone is worth a read (stop what you're doing and go directly there, read it, let it become a part of you). But here I'm more interested in the outgoing editor's essay with interesting numbers on the numbers of articles published by our flagship academic journal from 1993-2013. In the list, he ranks universities by number of articles submitted, and below that he ranks them by number of articles published. University of Texas, for example, leads in submissions (130) but is ranked third in terms of publications (29). Michigan State ranks fourth in terms of submissions (98) but first in terms of pubs (32).

Although the editor doesn't do it, below I take these two stats and create a new number we'll call Academic Success Rate -- or, simply, number of pubs divided by number of subs. I'm doing this on the fly, but the numbers look right, and I'm taking only the top programs from the two lists. Certainly there's a school out there with a perfect score -- one sub, one pub -- but it's not appearing in my number crunching. By my count, Indiana is the most successful with a .34 (or 34 percent of its subs becoming pubs). Georgia, where I teach, is seventh and would probably be higher if I'd stop sending stuff to the journal. I may have missed something somewhere, but you get the idea.

Rank	School	Score
1	Indiana	.34
2	Alabama	.33
2	Michigan State	.33
4	Florida	.30
4	Ohio State	.30
4	Washington State	.30
7	Georgia	.27
8	Southern Illinois	.22
8	Texas	.22
8	Wisconsin	.22
11	Missouri	.20

 
A few words about this analysis -- many faculty at top schools, even in journalism and mass comm, also submit to other top communication academic journals or even journals just outside our field.  On a related note, some schools not traditionally viewed as tops in the field may only submit their stuff to JQ (old name, sorry, JMCQ. I suspect Wisconsin's large submission rate has to do with its tradition of grad students flooding conferences and journals. Yes, other schools do it too, but Wisconsin is famous for it.

If I messed up my math, or missed a school, lemme know.

Watch for Deer

At 1 p.m. Monday we were turning left onto Epps Bridge Road and glanced to our right in time to see a deer run across the road and get struck by a car. At 1. In the friggin afternoon. What the hell, Bambi?

Ironically, my local paper ran a story today about deer being active in the area. Me being me, I also started looking for deer crash data to flesh out the information. The best I could find, and it's not great, is this pdf from the Georgia DOT. The most recent data is from 2006, making you wonder if deer stopped running into cars or if Georgia just stopped counting. Unfortunately, the data are in pdf form, so it's hard to sort and to easily see which counties rate the highest. Me being me, I managed to kinda sorta force feed them into a spreadsheet.  Below, a bit of ranking.

Raw Deer Accidents
2006 Data (# in parentheses)

1. Fayette (563)
2. Gwinnett (512)
3. Columbia (424)
4. Fulton (366)
5. Baldwin (364
6. Clarke (337)

I only went to 6th to showcase Athens-Clarke, where I live, because it's my blog and I can do what I want.  Okay, how about per miles traveled? That's better, because it kinda sorta controls for large populations.

Rate of Deer Accidents

1. Burke (92.4)
2. Baldwin (79.9)
3. Appling (75.4)
4. Fayette (53.3)
5. Columbia (46.8)

So I'd stay away from Fayette County -- high on both raw totals and rate of deer accidents per miles driven.

Rhodes Scholars

The latest batch of Rhodes Scholars were announced. None from UGA, where I teach, this time around. Out of curiosity I decided to run the numbers, based on this page, of SEC schools and how many Rhodes Scholars they've had. I suspect the latest batch are not included. Below, in alpha order, are the schools with the number of scholars in parentheses. If you wanted to rank them, it'd be (1) Vanderbilt (2) Georgia (3) Missouri (4) Alabama (5) Florida.

Alabama (15)
Arkansas (10)
Auburn (4)
Florida (12)
Georgia (23)
Kentucky (9)
LSU (14)
Mississippi (0)
Mississippi State (2)
Missouri (18)
South Carolina (8)
Tennessee (7)
Texas A&M (5)
Vanderbilt (26)

Is there any deeper meaning to this list? Perhaps not, except that the top five are probably also the best five academic schools in the conference, at least as measured by these and other awards (Goldwater, etc.) and the income SAT/ACT scores. Probably A&M underperforms and Alabama overperforms in terms of its academic quality and Rhodes ranking.

Picking A College

There are a ton of sites out there that tell you about various universities and help you plan what school to attend, your chances, and so on. I stumbled across this site today that tells the percent of out-of-state students at most major universities. Neat. It listed UGA has having 9 percent of its students from out of state. Is that right?

I checked via a way you can't, unless you have a UGA ID and know your way around a spreadsheet. I ran the numbers. It's actually, by my count, 13.7 percent. So what? So beware what web sites tell you, that's so what.

I wish the site was sortable. I see some 1 percent schools, some nearly half. There's probably a story in there somewhere.

Prof of the Year

Colleague John Knox of UGA was named Georgia's (the state, not the school) best university professor. You can see the entire list here, the press release about Knox here.

English and biology profs won in four states, math and physics profs in three.  Geography profs won in two states, as did chem and psych profs (three if you count psychological and brain sciences).  There's film and theater and Japanese, a mix here and there, and various flavors of engineering. It more or less looks like what you'd expect, given there are a lot more English and bio profs than there are, say, film profs.

Apparently Knox is the first UGA prof to win it since 2004. I haven't found a list yet over time. Will look again later.

UGA University Council

If you think UGA's University Council is supposed to act as a legislative branch or check on the executive branch (i.e., administration), then think again. The "rule-making" body of the University is presided over by the University president. Imagine Barack Obama in charge of the House or Senate. Yeah, right. To further separate the Council from, say, a faculty senate, look at how the math breaks down.

Source	Number
Faculty/Staff	155
Student	21
Ex-officio	32
Total	208

So administrative types, the ex-officios (deans, VPs, etc.) make up 15.4 percent of the voting body (a cynic might call them administrative lackeys, but that's largely unfair). Students make up 10.1 percent. The 155 faculty and staff are not separated on the site, but lumped together. I can't tell from first glance if this reflects faculty and staff council representation or includes, oddly, a bunch of administrative people. To clear this up I went to the raw data of members. First, while the Council site says there are 208 members, reflected in the table above, my count shows 214. Not sure why the discrepancy other than, perhaps, the site doesn't reflect recent additions of colleges, etc.

Okay, so back to the numbers. By my count there are 126 non-administrative faculty who are on the Council, or 58.9 percent of the body, and 21 students. So the math in the table above doesn't quite add up compared to the database of members, but I may easily be misidentifying someone (but let's face it, I'm probably not).

I mention this because (1) I'm stuck on the Council for three years (2) it just met and (3) it was ironic how many administrative types were there. Just saying. Like a VP is gonna vote against the president.

Oh, and for many "action items" voted on by the Council, the President can simply choose to ignore them. The exceptions are issues of curriculum, the academic calendar, and the guidelines for promotion and tenure.

Wanna check my math? See below.
 

Alpha Sort of Council Members	Number
Associate Provost & University Librarian	1
Campus Dean, Georgia Regents/UGA Medical Partnership	1
Chair, Staff Council	1
College of Agricultural & Environmental Sciences	15
College of Education	12
College of Engineering	3
College of Environment & Design	3
College of Family & Consumer Sciences	5
College of Pharmacy	4
College of Public Health	4
College of Veterinary Medicine	10
Dean, College of Agricultural & Environmental Sciences	1
Dean, College of Education	1
Dean, College of Engineering	1
Dean, College of Environment & Design	1
Dean, College of Family and Consumer Sciences	1
Dean, College of Pharmacy	1
Dean, College of Public Health	1
Dean, College of Veterinary Medicine	1
Dean, Franklin College of Arts & Sciences	1
Dean, Grady College of Journalism & Mass Communication	1
Dean, Odum School of Ecology	1
Dean, School of Law	1
Dean, School of Public & International Affairs	1
Dean, School of Social Work	1
Dean, Terry College of Business	1
Dean, Warnell School of Forestry & Natural Resources	1
Franklin College of Arts & Sciences	43
Grady College of Journalism & Mass Communication	4
Interim Dean, The Graduate School	1
Odum School of Ecology	2
Office of the Senior VP for Academic Affairs & Provost	6
Office of the Senior VP for Acadmeic Affairs & Provost	1
Office of the VP for Instruction	3
Office of the VP for Public Service & Outreach	8
Office of the VP for Research	4
Office of the VP for Student Affairs	4
President	1
President, Alumni Association	1
President, Graduate Student Association	1
President, Postdoctoral Association	1
President, Student Government Association	1
Registrar	1
School of Law	4
School of Public & International Affairs	4
School of Social Work	2
Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs & Provost	1
Staff Counci Representative	1
Staff Council Representative	7
Student Representative, College of Agricultural & Environmental Sciences	1
Student Representative, College of Education	1
Student Representative, College of Engineering	1
Student Representative, College of Environment & Design	1
Student Representative, College of Family & Consumer Sciences	1
Student Representative, College of Pharmacy	1
Student Representative, College of Public Health	1
Student Representative, Franklin College of Arts & Sciences	6
Student Representative, Grady College of Journalism & Mass Communication	1
Student Representative, School of Law	1
Student Representative, School of Public & International Affairs	1
Student Representative, Terry College of Business	1
Student Representative, The Graduate School	2
Terry College of Business	8
The Graduate School	1
Vice President for Development & Alumni Relations	1
Vice President for Finance & Administration	1
Vice President for Instruction	1
Vice President for Public Service & Outreach	1
Vice President for Research	1
Vice President for Student Affairs	1
Vice President, Student Government Association	1
Warnell School of Forestry & Natural Resources	3
Grand Total	214

Tack-On, or Just Tacky?

In its Florida State University shooting story today, The New York Times includes in the last graf:

The university, one of the largest in Florida, has about 40,000 students enrolled in 16 colleges spread across Tallahassee, the state capital. The university has recently drawn criticism after reports that athletes on its football team, a contender for this year’s national collegiate championship, had received preferential treatment from the police in criminal matters.

So 19 grafs are about the shooting, and the 20th graf is what you see above (at least in the version now up). There are lots of names for a graf like that -- context, background, fodder, padding. Probably others I'm missing. But is it merely a tack-on graf, or is it just plain tacky?

FSU fans, of course, are hardly objective. See below:

The NYT decided to take a shot at the football team in their story on the FSU shooting. Same paper who cheerleaded the Iraq War. #NoClass
— Matt Murphy (@MattMurph24) November 20, 2014

@DanHicken Read NYT on FSU shooting. This fair? pic.twitter.com/ehtWfn5vgq
— Garnet Hammer (@GarnetHammer) November 20, 2014

And so on. You get the idea.

I skimmed a few other news stories to see if others tacked on info about the cozy relationship between Tallahassee/FSU cops and athletes, but I didn't see any. That's interesting and damning for the NYT, but that doesn't make it wrong. Let's take a moment to consider a possible defense for the world's leading news organization. It is the NYT that has, after all, broke stories about the too cozy relationship between cops and football players at FSU (where are you, Florida media?). A reader of the NYT might see the FSU shooting story and think, wasn't that place in the news recently? The last graf reminds the audience why FSU rings a bell. Plus we're talking cops in the football story, and cops in a shooting story.

(I know, FSU fans, it's hard to imagine the school not being in the forefront of people's minds, but it's not Harvard, it's not MIT, hell it's barely on the list of top public universities, so excuse readers of the NYT for perhaps not thinking much at all about the school. Other than football, why would you?)

Okay, so much for the NYT defense. Now, the prosecution.

• It's telling that no other news org seems to have mentioned the football thing. That suggests a NYT bias.
• And let's say an FSU prof won a Pulitzer or Nobel in the past week, would you have tacked that on to the story? No. This feels more like piling on, to borrow from the football lexicon. 

At least it's in the last graf, so the bitching from the FSU fans should also be placed in context. It's the 20th graf of a 20-graf story, a tragic shooting story. An argument could be made it should go higher, in terms of context for the reader, so buried so low seems a reasonable place -- if you insist on including it.

My own take? I would have left it out, but I suspect it got added to the story by some editor along the way, tacked onto the bottom.



 

Driving Alone

We've all seen the long commute data, but here I'm going to focus on a similar but related measurement -- people who commute the longest, and who drive alone. Using data from this site, I ranked the counties in terms of people who drive alone to work, for the longest period. Why? Because commuting is considered bad for your physical and mental health -- and doing so alone is considered even worse. That's why it's measured in the first place.

Okay, you'd think counties near L.A., in California, or perhaps the greater Atlanta metroplex, would dominate the list. You'd be wrong. Survey says:

1. Elbert County, Colorado (71 minutes)
2. Park County, Colorado (67 minutes)
3. (tie) Gates County, North Carolina; Amelia County, Virginia; and Robertson County, Kentucky (66 minutes)
6. Charles City, Virginia (65 minutes)
7. (tie) Charles County, Maryland; San Jacinto County, Texas; and Paulding County, Georgia (64 minutes).

Okay, I'm bored typing. You get the idea. The Colorado counties serve Denver, the Kentucky county is the smallest in the state and is roughly halfway between Cincinnati and Lexington, Ky. There are a lot of Virginia counties high on the list, mostly around D.C. But coming in at 14th is New York if that makes you feel any better. Twenty-nine counties list an hour or longer of a commute alone.

Okay, but is a long commute alone really a bad thing?

Let's take Elbert County, Colorado. It's only in the second quartile when it comes to "poor mental health days" ranks in the lowest (best) quartile in "poor physical health days." In other words, you can't easily draw a connection, at least not with one relatively well-off county. To really do this, we need to correlate all the county scores on mental and physical health with time commuting alone. That's a bit more challenging. See below:

Correlation of Minutes Commuting Alone With...

• Poor Mental Health Days: r = .21
• Lack Physical Activity: r = .34

So there is a correlation between minutes commuting alone and physical and mental health. As one increases, so does the other. But correlation is not causality. To really do this, we need to statistically control for other possible explanatory factors. For example, the number of kids in poverty is also correlated with long lonely commutes (r = .46), but there's no reason to believe they're related. Hell, I even found a small correlation between commuting alone and the percent of people in a county with sexually transmitted diseases (r = .06). I'm willing to bet they're also unrelated (then again ...)

If I really get bored, I may tackle a multivariate approach. But I'd have to be really really bored. It's not a terribly difficult job if I fold the data into SPSS, but I have a long list of other data projects waiting my attention, so feeding this blog is not a priority. My hunch is there is a small yet statistically significant relationship between long, lonely commutes and mental/physical health, but it's modest at best once you control for all the other factors, such as poverty.

Of Polls and Cicadas ...

Public opinion scholar Dick Yarbrough wrote a column recently in which he talks with an imaginary friend, Junior E. Lee. It's possible Yarbrough often talks to imaginary friends, but that's a different issue. Let's set aside the tired old crutch of conversing in a column with a make-believe foil and instead turn to his deep knowledge of public opinion and polling:

Junior said polling firms do that kind of thing so candidates will commission more polls and pollsters can make more money before they disappear until the next election cycle. He says pollsters are like cicadas who are here for a short time and then gone; particularly those pollsters who have no other skill sets to fall back on — like the pest control profession. While cicadas stay underground for 17 years, pollsters show up every election cycle. Junior says that is why he prefers cicadas. You don’t see them as much and they aren’t as noisy.

Point #1: When candidates commission polls the results are almost never released to the public. Those are called "internals." You release them only when it suits you, such as your candidate being far behind but your "in-house" pollster cooks the numbers in such a way as to make you see more viable than perhaps you really are.

Point #2: Yes, cicadas stay under ground, some for 17 years, some for 13 years. In Georgia it's Brood VI and it's a 17-year sleep. We wont' see 'em again until 2017, a year after the next presidential election. It really would have worked nicely had they returned in 2016.  Damn nature.

Point #3: You don't have to look at the polls if you find them noisy. I tend not to look at stupid newspaper columns, except when they include cutting-edge polling analysis.

Point #4: Agreed, not sure what other skills a pollster can fall back on, but a lot of them do other stuff. Take InsiderAdvantage, a Georgia company, as an example. While it's not a particularly high-rated polling outfit (stats guru Nate Silver gave it a "D" grade, it's still doing post-election analyses and advances on the next legislative session. 

Full Disclosure: Yarbrough has given generously to my college and UGA.

Smoking

There is only one county in the U.S. where over half of all adults smoke. Scott County, Tennessee, has 51 percent of its adults listed as smokers, according to data on this site. While near the Kentucky border, it's not a huge tobacco growing county. It is in the fourth quartile among all U.S. counties in terms of premature death, in lack of physical or mental health, children in poverty, and unemployment.

A caveat -- some counties have relatively small sample sizes. Scott County's, for example, is 82, so the 95 percent confidence interval would be from 33 percent to 69 percent. Also, not all counties have data available. These data list the percent smoking for 2,713 of 3,144 counties.

The Top Smoking Counties

1. Scott (Tennessee)
2. Limestone (Texas)
3. Northwest Arctic (Alaska)
4. (tie) Ripley in Missouri and Upshur in Texas

And so on. The highest Georgia County is Lincoln, with 44 percent of its adults listed as smokers, ranked for 13th in the country. Kentucky counties appear regularly in the top of the list.

The lowest? Madison County, Idaho, followed by some Utah counties, no doubt a Mormon effect. The lowest Georgia county is Burke, with only 9 percent listed as adult smokers.

Study Abroad

(update below)

UGA is ranked 17th in terms of total numbers of students who study abroad. That's pretty damn good and it's something Georgia encourages to the point of being obnoxious about it. Click on the link to see entire list, but it's clear the roots of some of the differences. One is location (major metro), another is being an expensive school, and the final is enrollment size. Me being me, I decided to deal with the latter and to see what schools do well controlling for enrollment.

I got most of my enrollment figures from this site, which is 2011 data, and figured what percentage of the total enrollment studied abroad. Most of the schools enroll more students now, but the differences between schools is minimal. Here and there I had to supplement with other data to flesh out the list and I'm not perfectly happy with some of the numbers. Still, here is the new and improved Top 10 (because I don't wanna type 20) for study abroad. See below. Notice right off how well smaller schools do in this format. And of course UGA cracks the list, coming in at 9th.

Study Abroad Ranked by Percent of Students

1. George Washington University
2. Northeastern University
3. Miami (Ohio) University
4. University of Pennsylvania
5. New York University
6. University of Southern California
7. Boston University
8. San Diego state University
9. University of Georgia
10. University of Michigan

UPDATE

I found some slightly better data. The list changes, with Northeastern taking first place, NYU moving up to 2nd, Penn at 3rd. UGA stays in 8th and Miami of Ohio drops to 9th. I suppose for Georgia readers the point remains the same -- UGA does well when you consider enrollment.

A Baby (curricular) Step

Our revised journalism curriculum took a baby step Monday with unanimous approval from the college curriculum committee. Next stop -- the full college faculty in December. Assuming Grady faculty approval, our next step will be the university's curriculum committee. It's UGA. There are layers upon layers upon layers of bureaucracy.

I expect more bumps and bruises from the Grady meeting than from the university meeting, which tends to look more at the procedural stuff. The Grady meeting, that'll be entertaining.

I've written at length about our new curriculum. It combines our broadcast and print majors into a program that looks more like what happens in the real world, and will include students all working for a time at Grady Newsource (though not all on the broadcast side, many on the web/mobile side). For those of you who know something of our program, JOUR3410 (once called 341) will become a "writing across platforms" course. More emphasis will be given to investigative reporting. All students will get experience working in video as well as writing. The curriculum will be difficult to cover, given so many skills classes, but odds are the size of our skills classes will also increase somewhat, from 16 to 20. More work for faculty but not a terrible or impossible burden. Plus if it doesn't work, we can always tweak it.

Do NOT expect a unanimous vote before the full Grady faculty. More likely we'll have a handful of negative votes, not coincidentally from the same folks who voted against the merger of programs in the first place (they wanted a full merger of Telecom and Journalism, but the "media arts" side of Tele has spun off into its own department).  

The curriculum will pass, despite a few naysayers who, frankly, have apparently never learned how to persuade people. Rule 1: don't stand up in a full faculty meeting and lecture your peers, even if you're convinced no one could possibly be your peer. Plus learn how to work the backhalls. Hell, learn to find the friggin backhalls. It's like some faculty failed Politics 101. Or couldn't even get admitted to the class.

Searching for "J-school"

Search for "j-school" via Google (while not logged into Google, GMail, etc., and the first entry, of course, is the wikipedia article on "journalism school." After that, you get a list of schools and other stuff, all 588,000 hits. Where the school is listed below, it's the main site.

1. UC Berkeley
2. UNC
3. Missouri
4. CUNY
5. Columbia
6. Kansas
7. CUNY's Twitter account
8. Florida's Twitter account
9. Wisconsin
10. A MOOC I've never heard of

I gave up looking for my own j-school (Grady, at UGA). I'm sure we're there somewhere. Eventually. And it's kinda funny that UF's Twitter account appears via Google before the college site.

By the third page you start to get articles that use the term "j-school" in them, often in a disparaging manner, but not always so. Me, I'm a fan of the word.

This Blog

I've been hammering away at this blog since May 2006. Yes, that long. It rarely attracts much traffic, but in glancing at my analytics today I see that I'm approaching 125,000 pageviews. It's time to take stock.

How Do People Get Here?

Google dominates, with twice as many referrals as Twitter. After that comes Facebook, my own web page, and various flavors of Google (UK, Canada, etc.).

What's more interesting is a list of keywords that most often land people on my blog. The top:

1. cognitive mobilization
2. political knowledge and political participation
3. titular colonicity
4. cognitive mobilization definition
5. whatpeopleknow.blogspot.com
6. in hell
7. perceived knowledge
8. hot place
9. michelle bachmann
10. what people know

A few words about this odd list. Yeah, I wrote about Bachmann, probably too much. And titular colonicity is just too much fun. Early in my blogging I wrote about "cognitive mobilization" mainly because it was an early research area of mine. Haven't touched the stuff in years. As to "in hell" and "hot place," I did some posts like this one that probably attracted traffic.

Top Posts

A few years ago there was an infamous walkout at our student newspaper, The Red & Black. I wrote about it. A lot. As you can see below, my posts from that period in summer 2012 lead the way in terms of popularity.

In all, five of my top 10 posts involve the R&B walkout. You can take to Google and get the background because, frankly, I'm in no mood to write more on the topic other than to say the good guys won. Otherwise you can see the top posts more or less reflect the keyword results above. To the left, my traffic spikes over time. That weird 2010 spike? No idea. I've gone back and for the life of me I can't figure it out. While I can't yet find the specific post, I'm fairly certain I blogged about something, put an image on the blog, and mentioned it in a listserv that generated a lot of visits.

Where Are Readers From?

It's no surprise that most of my audience is based in the U.S., but what may be surprising -- or disconcerting -- is that second place is owned by Russia and 5th place by Ukraine. See the list below:

1. U.S. (81,156)
2. Russia (5,488)
3. Germany (4,205)
4. U.K. (2,979)
5. Ukraine (2,452)

Other Factoids

Chrome is the leading browser, used by a third of my audience, followed by Firefox (26 percent) and Internet Explorer (22 percent). Windows computers make up 61 percent of my traffic.

Summary

I have no summary. This is a modest blog, one that rarely influences or informs or even entertains. And sometimes it does all three. It has migrated from being strictly about political media research to one that covers lots of different things, but beyond that there's little more you can say.

What's in a Name? Ideology

Is your first name liberal or conservative?

Okay, lemme admit that normally I ignore sponsored tweets via Twitter, but this one hit me where I live -- data, and politics. You can go here and type in your first name to find out where you are, on the ideological spectrum, at least as decided by your first name.

My name, Barry, is middle-to-conservative.

So how do they do it?

Crowdpac calculates this score based on the average of all campaign contributions made by people with this name since 1980. 10L is the most liberal; 10C is the most conservative.

Hence the "crowd" in Crowdpac. Essentially folks named "Barry" have tended to give to candidates located ideologically in the middle and slightly more to the right. Okay, but how do they decide whether the money went to a leftie or rightie candidate? Not sure, but the site has a data blog that looks promising.

And the best journalism program is ...

Everyone loves a list, otherwise Buzzfeed would be out of business.

Most lists come with little or no explanation of how they were generated. Methodology is ignored -- especially if its more smoke-and-mirrors than methodology. Which brings us to a list published a year ago, one we at UGA loved (because we finished 3rd) and some of us loathed (because of the iffy methodology). Faculty could, ahem, (*cough* *cough*) recruit folks to vote for their school. And yes, after the poll Grady promoted its 3rd place finish. What you end up with is a biased beauty contest.

RTDNA is doing its survey again. It warns: 

Please submit your response to the survey only once. Multiple submissions will be disregarded.

Which is good, if enforceable. If you follow the link, you get the following page:

Below is a list of suggested programs you can type into the five spaces. I did, tossing in random schools and even one not on the list, then I got a screen asking for my reason for #1. Skipped that. Then the survey asks:

If you were to advise journalism programs about the single most important class they could have to prepare today's young people for a career in journalism, what would it be?

That's an interesting and important question. A cynic might recommend a class in survey sampling, but the obvious answer is Data Journalism, so just write that in and keep me employed. Then you're asked for "professional status." I put "Educator" (many might quibble with that, yet "Whisky Drinker" wasn't available). You get asked a filler "anything else" question and poof, you're done.

Yes, but can you go back and do the survey again?

Short answer ... no.
Long answer ... yes.

Just clear your cookies (find how depending on your browser) and the link returns you to the survey. Fill it out, clear cookies. Rinse and repeat, voting early and often (if that's your thing). Results out on Dec. 15.

Setting aside how to hack a SLOP, what does it mean to be a "best" journalism program?  Hell if I know. A lot of it is reputation. The traditionally top programs draw the best students, which leads to the best graduates, which leads to a sustained reputation. Plus the more grads you have, the more you can persuade into voting for you and thus skewing the results. It sure as hell can't hurt to be a grad from a "top-rated" program when out on the job market, so vote for your school. It's in your own best interest.
 
You can succeed in journalism without ever having stepped into a j-school, which suggests such lists should never be taken too seriously. Rarely do people report the caveats of how they created a list, similar to that of (irony alert) certain student news broadcasts when they report SLOPS as part of their newscast. Or used to.

But let's face it, even in a bad list ya still want to come out on top. So vote Grady. Vote early. And vote often.