Thread by @jbenton

In March 2008, @brianstelter wrote a story for @nytimes about how young people were getting news online. It's a pretty straightforward story — but there's one quote in it that still has an impact on debates about digital journalism today. 1/x nytimes.com/2008/03/27/us/…

Brian quotes a woman who had done a focus group with college students recently about their news habits, and the response one of them gave stood out:

"If the news is that important, it will find me."

Maybe you've heard that quote in the years since — it nicely sums up a really critical change in how we get our news.

When we got our news via TV and newspaper, news consumption was habit-driven. You'd read the same paper every morning or watch the same newscast every night.

So whatever its merits, you were getting an edited product pushed out to you on a regular basis.

In digital, though, our news consumption is less habit-driven — news sneaks into various moments of the day. And it reaches you as an individual story, not an edited package.

And though 2008 was pretty early in Facebook and Twitter's heyday, as social media rose, you became increasingly dependent on other people's sharing behavior for news to reach you.

"If the news is that important, it will find me." It's a brilliant sentence, actually!

That phrasing even got adopted into the academic literature as the "news-finds-me perception" (shoutout to old @NiemanLab pal @_HGZ_), and a nice little literature has grown up around it. academic.oup.com/jcmc/article/2…

So why am I telling you all this?

The woman who conducted that focus group, the one she told @brianstelter about 11 years ago, was named Jane Buckingham.

And she got indicted this morning in the big college admissions scandal.

Buckingham is charged with paying $50,000 to have someone pretend to be her son and take the ACT for him. And the feds have tapes. documentcloud.org/documents/5766…

Buckingham says on the tapes that her son needs to get a 34 on the ACT (out of 36). The surrogate tester did even better and got a 35.

Buckingham joked that, once the scammer gets her son his fake ACT score, "I need you to get him into USC, and then I need you to cure cancer and [make peace] in the Middle East...You know, Harvard, the rest of it. I have faith in you."

Once her son's score came in, Buckingham said she would "probably like to do the same thing with [my daughter] with her ACTs" because she is "not a great test taker." But she wouldn't need a 35 — "if she got a 32 or 33, I'm assuming that would make her pretty competitive."

I won't mention her kids' names here, but they're known people in that weird world of teen ~influencers~. The daughter has 1.4 million followers on Instagram. (Importantly, none of the kids have been charged in any of these cases — just parents, coaches, and the scammers.)

And it's clear from the indictment that Buckingham didn't want her son to know this fraud was going on — she went so far as to arrange for him to take a fake ACT test so he'd think the score was real.

I don't really have a grand concluding point? But I figured I might be the only human alive who saw the connection from that 2008 @brianstelter article to today's biggest story, so I thought I'd mention it for the record. /end

Addendum: I thought about ending this thread with either:

"The news found her."

OR

"If the ACT score is that important, it'll find my son."

How should I have ended it?

Also, if you need a gift, you might want to consider one of Jane Buckingham's books, including "The Modern Girl's Guide to Motherhood" and, um, "The Modern Girl's Guide to Sticky Situations"

("a helpful handbook for surviving headaches, pickles, jams, and everyday emergencies")

Holy frickin' moly

https://twitter.com/heoj/status/1105528105240875011

Also, for the curious, here's Buckingham on @GMA in January, previewing the "top trends for 2019"

(Marigold is THE color of the year)

abcnews.go.com/GMA/Style/vide…

(also big in 2019: PUTTING CHEESE IN YOUR COFFEE)

Related: I wrote an angry column about this phenomenon for @dallasnews way back in 2006, hooked to @DanLGolden's then-new (and still very good) book The Price of Admission. In it, he lays out how Jared Kushner snuck into Harvard with dad's money clipfile.org/?p=862