Property values in Davis Sq (and Somerville)

[nvidia99999.livejournal.com]

I just saw in the Somerville News an estimate saying that property values in Somerville declined 2% this year:
http://www.thesomervillenews.com/main.asp?SectionID=2&SubSectionID=2&ArticleID=218. Somebody mentioned that Zillow actually reports a loss of about 8%. This is confusing. The Editor of the Somerville News pointed out that Zillow does not have accurate estimates. In my experience, Zillow is pretty on the mark when it comes to sale prices, they seem to be doing lots of good stats on their datasets. Any idea on how to gather additional information on this? I doubt one can trust the Somerville News, given that it was created by the owners of ERA, one of the Somerville Real Estate agencies (clearly, they would not want to advertise that property values are going down around here).

One funny tidbit. Have you received a pack of coupon last week? I received one, and one of the coupons was an ad for ERA, the Norton Group. It says: "Voted #1 Real Estate Company 2000 to 2007 By the readers of the Somerville News"! Now, when many of the readers are ERA employees or relatives of ERA employees, that is a bit of a conflict of interest, isn't it? :)

Comments

Re: thanks laryu

[cos]

That's rather different, actually. Also, there's a very strong feedback loop between readers and the paper, influencing each other's tastes & apetites, but even though they may be in denial about it, newspapers actually have the stronger hand in the loop, and do more to push it one way or the other, even when they honestly believe they're "just responding to what readers want". Also, some forces that seem to be "reader influenced" are more fundamental, and would be present with any readership.

Nevertheless, these are not the same as what I'm referring to.

One thing I learned while researching this is how hard it can be to see the whole field of the process & effects, especially for people who are in the middle of it themselves.

Re: thanks laryu

[thetathx1138.livejournal.com]

One thing I learned while researching this is how hard it can be to see the whole field of the process & effects, especially for people who are in the middle of it themselves.

True to a point, but don't forget how many people think working in a newspaper is just like it is in the movies. There was a pretty interesting article on Politico back in late October about how John McCain's news coverage was so awful, I'll see if I can find it for you.

Like I said, no organization is perfect, but claims of organized, intentional bias just really irritate me, especially when they're baseless. Just like the acronym "MSM"; it's become shorthand for "people I don't believe because they don't tell me I'm right all the time."

media bias

[cos]

You may be responding to something other than what you think you're responding to, then.

I certainly wasn't thinking of movies.

Ownership does create a very strong bias; I'm not sure whether "intentional" vs. "unintentional" is a meaningful or useful way to evaluate it. I suspect it's not really useful.

I don't really like the term "MSM", though "traditional media" is a fairly useful term for the same thing.

One common feature of traditional media is their subscription to the philosophy of "objectivity", which as practiced by American media generally means: for each issue, break it down into two opposing sides. Report what each side says. I actually find that to be a serious distortion in many cases, so I'm very happy to have some "not objective" media to get a better understanding from. But that one's also different from the ownership bias.

Re: media bias

[nvidia99999.livejournal.com]

Great point, cos. I'm really tired even of NPR because of this "objectivity" BS. In some cases, one side if obviously wrong and it should be declared so. What is the point of inviting their spin people and waste everybody's time? More importantly, it distorts rationality.

Re: media bias

[cos]

When one side is obviously wrong, at least that's easy to see if you've got some knowledge, or sometimes even if not. But merely looking at things as if they can all be turned into two sides makes much bigger and weirder distortions, because most issues really have lots of different "sides", and their relationships to each other are rarely all "opposition". This kind of coverage distorts people into looking at things in terms of two sides - even if they can tell when one is obviously wrong.

Re: media bias

[jamesnorton.livejournal.com]

wonderful conversation on this topic - i enjoyed it.