Being a journalist in 2022 means receiving nearly incessant public relations pitches in your email inbox. In particular, P.R. teams have figured out that one surefire way to get media attention is to rank cities and states against one another, in any category possible.
Just this week, for example, I’ve received the following pitches:
• Salt Lake City was the 41st “Best City for Chocolate Lovers.”
• Salt Lake City was the third “Best City for Country Music Fans.”
• Salt Lake City was the 61st ranked “Cities Where Lawns Go to Die.”
And so on and so on. The big caveat with all of these rankings is that they can tend to use some sketchy underlying metrics. For example, one aspect of the city’s third-place country music rating was its high placement in the “Number of Country Music and Related Museums” category. I’m, uh, unaware of Salt Lake City’s country music museum.
Another such ranking did catch my eye: Utah being ranked No. 44 in the “Best and Worst States to Work in America.” First, this wasn’t put together by a lawn company — indeed, this was a report from Oxfam, named after the Oxford Committee for Famine Relief. It’s a highly regarded international nonprofit fighting world poverty, lending significant reputation points to the report. Then, the underlying statistics used were also well-cited: having a bibliography in a data report is always a good sign, but having a lengthy one is even...
Congress leaders Harshwardhan Sapkal and Nana Patole, Nationalist Congress Party (SP) legislator Rohit Pawar, and Shiv Sena (Uddhav Balasaheb Thackeray) leader Priyanka Chaturvedi said PM Modi's sp...