EDITOR'S NOTE: In June 2004 I began a new venture as managing editor of both Northfield News and Faribault Daily News. This column originally appeared in the Northfield News on Feb. 10, 2006.
Bravo! It seems that a few clever little devils who play around on the Web site democraticunderground.com have discovered a secret that we at the Northfield News have been closely guarding for years.
But, alas, it's time to come clean. We might as well share the top-secret information with you, all of our readers, now that the word is out.
Sit down and brace yourselves. Here it is: The News' online poll that we upload in conjunction with every issue is not a highly protected online poll, meaning that industrious computer users can vote more than once if they desire and know how to. Astonishing news, I know.
But in the interests of explaining why our poll had nearly 500 respondents in Wednesday's paper (when normally 80 respondents is a good number), I felt that I'd better share the news with our trusting readers. We wouldn't want you to lose faith in your news-gathering team here, simply because you did not trust the results of our online poll.
Each issue, it is I that checks the News' Web site, records the responses we receive to our poll and prepares the Opinion page on which the results appear.
Well, when I checked the poll on Tuesday and found that nearly 500 people had responded to the question "What is your reaction to President Bush's State of the Union address that took place Tuesday night?" I had a distinct feeling that something was afoul. But, you know, the poll results were there; I didn't have any proof that there weren't nearly 500 readers who cared to respond to such a question (as with political questions you never know in Northfield); and so I posted the results on our Opinion page.
A couple hours later I received by fax an ominous note in scrawling handwriting that warned me that our poll had been hijacked by the users of the above mentioned Web site, and the fax also included a couple of printed pages of online conversations that took place between these people who cared enough to take the time to tamper with a small town newspaper's online poll. (Sounds like a fun bunch, huh!) I checked the site and sure enough found that someone on the site was directing other visitors to the site to our poll, I can only imagine in the effort to skew the results. So that explained Wednesday's nearly 500 respondents, whom I'm assuming could really have been a couple of techno-nerds, who in between bites of their Doritos, spent endless minutes voting and re-voting on our poll. I'm flattered to think that someone out there is so politically motivated that they think that News' online poll is so influential that it was important to skew the results. The thought serves to inflate my already large ego and make me think that the News can topple world leaders. And I owe it all to the supremely intelligent beings who use democraticunderground.com.
However, after visiting the site on Wednesday, I'm a bit confused as to what their objectives may have been. Even just a quick glance of the site shows that whomever runs it and uses it must be somewhere far on the left side of the political spectrum. So why in the end did they vote enough times to make the answer "I thought it was inspiring" the No. 1 answer? Rats ... another important mystery I'll never know the answer to.
Anyway, there you have it dear readers; our secret has been exposed. The online poll that we bring to you twice a week isn't guarded with the most up-to-date technological defense mechanisms and therefore shouldn't be considered scientific. I guess this means that for all of you whom in the past have based major philosophical decisions upon the outcome of the News' online poll, should maybe hold off until the day that we sink a lot of money into preventing the democraticunderground.com folks from skewing the poll.
For those of you however who have used the poll for what it was intended for -- a bit of fun and unscientific surveys of how our community feels about issues -- I encourage you to forge ahead. We won't let the unveiling of one our deepest secrets affect our use of the poll, if you don't. -- Devlyn Brooks is managing editor of the Northfield News.
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