The Chronicle‘s Jenalia Moreno reports on a new Pew Hispanic Center study.
She even notes that it was “released today.”
And her story was posted at 12:41 am this morning.
Moreno must be a quick study, to digest the contents of the report, obtain her quotes, file her story, and get the thing edited and posted to the web in 41 minutes!
Because the newspaper surely would not report on something it hadn’t even seen or reproduce quotes from a press release.
Now, I realize that Pew faxed and emailed advance press releases to major media in the country, who had decisions to make about how to report the information. That’s fairly common practice. However, it’s amusing to me the extent to which major media does advance “reporting” like this all of the time, and most folks think they’re actually covering the news instead of recycling press releases.
Incidentally, the Washington Post chose to characterize their advance coverage in the following manner:
Walsh’s experience parallels a trend seen nationwide over the course of the 2001 recession and the sluggish recovery that has followed, as minority families lost significant ground to whites in terms of household wealth, according to a report to be released today by the Pew Hispanic Center.
That’s a more honest approach.
I haven’t had a chance yet to examine the study closely, but it looks to be rich in data. I’m looking forward to delving into the results and methodology more carefully. For readers who care to do the same, it is available here (link to pdf file). In the meantime, I think this is a useful observation from Robert Suro, director of the Pew Hispanic Center:
The wealth gap should shrink as the Latino population and acquires greater education, especially college degrees.
In this election season, most folks can probably agree about the importance of education in the accumulation of wealth over time.
