One reader questioned our approach to a story about college students. So we called her. ·

23 Aug 2024, 00:00

Articles in The Washington Post often draw hundreds of provocative, emphatic, critical comments online. Recently, one of the co-authors of a Post Magazine cover story interviewed someone who had commented on her article.

In April, Post reporter Harrison Smith and I each followed a different college student on the same day. Harrison tagged along with Sheila Suarez, a 23-year-old commuter student at the University of Maryland Baltimore County, the first in her family to go to college; I followed Lars E. Schonander, 19, a student at George Washington University whose family is able to pay the annual $51,875 price tag for tuition. Our minute-by-minute narrations of their day were then interspersed and published together as a single story.

The original aim of the piece was to look at the differences between “typical” undergrads, as described in government statistics, and the popular image of undergrads that persists despite that data. By shadowing two college students, we wanted see what those differences looked like in daily life. Then we left it up to readers to decide what they thought of the results — which a few found frustrating.

One day, two students: What college looks like from opposite ends of the income gap

One of those readers was Jennifer Bonin of St. Petersburg. Under username “Reythia,” she wrote in the comments section: “I’m not sure what we’re supposed to get out of this. Is it unfortunately that Sheila has to work and thus struggles more because of money and a bizarre medical condition? Yes. But beyond that, what? Both she and Lars seemed like upstanding young people. This piece might have made more sense if they’d picked two students more like each other, so the differences due to money were the only thing there. As an obvious example, pick two kids who go to the same school, in the same major.”

I called her to hear more about her critique. Bonin, 38, works at the University of South Florida’s College of Marine Science as a research scientist. She measures the Earth’s gravity in space, which sounds cool but is “not all that sexy,” she said. Observing her at work would “be incredibly boring. You’d see me working on my computer all day and staring at it.”

She said she most often looks at The Washington Post’s website when her computer code is running, and after reading a story, she will at least glance at the comment section below. “I enjoy or am exasperated by reading the comments,” she said with a laugh. She is methodical about her approach: jumping to the comments without perusing the story is a no-no, she told me, “like reading the last page of a book.”

Suffice it to say, Bonin values controlled experiments. To measure how one factor affects everything else, “you can only change one thing at a time,” she explained. That’s one reason this story missed the mark for her — too many variables.

Bonin also felt the piece suffered from a lack of closure. It began with an overview paragraph, which explained the premise and presented some relevant statistics, but there was no bookend paragraph to conclude the story. “I wasn’t sure quite what you were trying to get at there,” she told me. “It was just, ‘Here are two people.’ Now what?”

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But should articles underline such a clear-cut message for their readers? I asked Bonin. Did she want a call to action at the end? She said the format of the story had her anticipating some kind of coda. “Because there are only two [students], you’re expecting a compare-contrast,” she said. “If you want to do something like this again and not draw any conclusions, then have more than two examples.” If we had included ten students “with wildly different stories,” then Bonin wouldn’t have assumed there’d be a bow to tie everything up.

I told Bonin that the more subtle variances between their days fascinated me, making visible what can remain unseen. For instance, Sheila spends part of her morning worried about finding parking. If she doesn’t get to campus early enough to score a free spot, she’ll be saddled with a $2 per hour bill from a visitor lot. Lars, who lives a short walk from all his classes, just doesn’t have that concern. For Bonin, however, this was a data point without significance. “I had friends who had to do that all the time,” she said. “To me, that’s just how it is.”

Bonin’s criticisms were a reminder of the tension between a scientific and a narrative worldview. Controlled experiments are designed to winnow out alternate explanations; narratives intend to leave the door open for them. They are inherently messier. We wanted readers to interpret for themselves the differences and similarities between Sheila and Lars — a process that may speak to some more than others.

Rachel Kurzius is the associate editor of DCist.

One reader questioned our approach to a story about college students. So we called her.

Articles in The Washington Post often draw hundreds of provocative, emphatic, critical comments online. Recently, one of the co-authors of a Post Magazine cover story interviewed someone who had commented on her article.

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