Before anything else this morning, I want to thank you, or to be more precise, a very substantial percentage of you, for filling out the survey yesterday. We ran it for twenty-four hours and got a bit more than 18,600 respondents. So we’re happy with the sample size.
Like last year, there were a few complaints about the lack of a sufficient number of categories to choose when asked to define oneself politically. There were also a few exceptions taken by folks whose profession wasn’t mentioned in the ‘what you do’ category. No listing for scientist, farmer, artist, etc.
So allow me to explain. If I were building the survey from the ground up, I’d do it differently. But this was the exact same survey we did last year. And there was a utility to having a direct apples to apples comparison, to see what if any ways the audience has changed in the last eighteen months.
More particularly, though, the point of this exercise was not self-expression. It was to gain some basic data for advertisers. And lest that come off as snide, I don’t mean it that way. If I were doing this survey out of my own curiosity or to understand my audience better, I would have designed it very differently. I’d have given a more finely nuanced range of possible political self-definitions, a different way of categorizing professions, and I’d also probably have asked a series of what I’d see as defining political questions — ones which, I think, would be more revealing than labels.
In this case, I wanted to ask as few questions as possible (so I could honestly say that it would take little time) and get the information we really needed — not for editorial purposes, but to get some basic data for advertisers. So that’s the deal.
In any case, to return to the main point, almost twenty-thousand of you took the time to fill it out. And like I said yesterday, on a personal level, I really appreciate that. So thank you.
We’ll be sharing the results with you when they’re ready.
