Regarding the website. The New York Times’ David Carr had a good line about the Huffington Post the other day:

I’ve written before that The Huffington Post may be one of the fastest build-outs of an editorial brand in history, all the while complaining that it derived a lot of value from digitally kidnapping the work of others.
But I’ve come to understand that it doesn’t matter what I think is right and wrong, or what I think constitutes appropriate aggregation or great journalism. The market is as the market does.

I think Carr is right, unfortunately. A few years ago I was disappointed in this trend of how some reporters would take other outlets’ content and repackage it without doing very much (or any) original reporting of their own. Everything would be appropriately attributed, but it still seemed … icky. When I covered national news for the New York Daily News, I would always try to do my own reporting, even if I was just duplicating the work of other news outlets.

But more and more Internet sites are adopting this new formula, including the Daily News. Also look at the Daily Mail, Digital Journal, JimRomenesko.com, the International Business Times, the Gawker media family of sites, the Drudge Report, the Gothamist family of blogs, numerous tech blogs, the Poynter Institute’s Mediawire, the Daily Beast’s Cheat Sheet, Forbes.com, GlobalPost.com, BusinessInsider.com and so on. Like it or not, aggregation seems to be one of the few formulas that work on the Internet. (Sometimes, very well — Romenesko was I think earning a six-figure salary when he was at Poynter).

I don’t know if you followed the minor flap over how Forbes.com “stole” a 6,700-word New York Times magazine story on Target’s consumer research practices. Forbes.com condensed the story, focusing on its most sensational element: How Target figured out a teen girl was pregnant before her father did. It probably took the writer an afternoon – while the original story, which had a lackluster headline, was the result of months of work. The repackaged article drew around a million page views, earning Forbes an estimated $15,000 in advertising revenue.

Under current U.S. intellectual property laws, this type of appropriation seems to be legal, because news and facts can’t be copyrighted. I don’t see this changing, for better or for worse.

Outside of journalism, you also see aggregation sites succeeding in other fields: I search for airfares using Kayak.com and Hipmunk.com, scan for jobs using job-aggregation website Indeed.com, buy baseball tickets using ticket aggregator fansnap.com and check movie reviews on Rottentomatoes.com and metacritic.com.

Basically this is just a long-winded way of saying that like it or not, I think aggregation is the wave of the future. As Carr says, it doesn’t matter if we think it’s right or wrong, great journalism or not. It’s a proven business model, and the market is as the market does. It’s like outsourcing and the loss of American manufacturing jobs to China: A trend that’s going to inexorably continue.

So my advice is, if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. [Your newspaper] should get in front of the aggregation and outsourcing trends by hiring a bunch of Chinese teenagers at 5 cents a story to repackage the work of [several competitors].

Just kidding. Kind of.

Anyway, that is my two cents about where I see digital journalism headed. I wish I could make a different prediction and say I think the Internet will eventually support and pay for expensive, high-quality journalism. But I don’t think it will, so I’d encourage you to do more with aggregation and repackaging. I think there’s ways to do so ethically and with proper attribution, like the Daily Beast’s Cheat Sheet does. A local version, maybe?

A couple more thoughts: Five or 10 years ago, many people, including myself, thought that maybe online advertising would be eventually be the savior of newspapers; that all they had to do was ride out the conversion to online and eventually ad revenues would be there to support them. But it’s not working out that way. Newspapers’ online advertising sales have stalled amid broader weakness in the online display advertising industry. Last week Microsoft announced its first-ever loss as a public company after a $6.2 billion write-down of advertising firm aQuantive, which it had bought for $6.3 billion in 2007. Reuters reports:

The average cost to reach 1,000 people with an online display ad fell to about $11.50 at the end of 2011 from $13.35 in late 2009, according to SQAD Inc, which tracks negotiated ad deals. In July 1998, Yahoo was getting about $25 per thousand, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Basically there’s been an explosion of advertising space from ad exchanges and from Facebook, which made $3.2 billion selling ads last year. This is pushing the cost of ads down, putting more pressure on newspapers.

The publisher I wrote to has implemented a “soft” paywall (you get a couple of articles for free, then have to start paying), which may help bring in subscriptions, but I think it’s too soon to say whether that’ll bring in enough to revenue support a full-fledged local newspaper. Meanwhile we can certainly predict where the advertising revenue that has been newspaper’s mainstay will be going: Down.

The 39 Buddhists had came to southeastern Arizona from around the country, putting their lives on hold and paying as much as $75,000 to live amid in isolation rock and cactus in tiny cabins.

But now the experiment for world peace has gone wrong. One of the participants is dead after being kicked out of “great retreat” amid accusations he and his wife had engaged in bizarre, spiritually inspired domestic violence.

Christie McNally and Ian Thorson had apparently been living in a small mountain cave near the retreat center for 2 1/2 months after their excommunication, and Thorson, a 38-year-old Stanford University graduate and New York City resident, was found dead April 22 after falling ill.

McNally, 39, an internationally known yoga teacher and spiritual guide who co-founded the retreat, was near death herself when she used a cell phone to call for help, according to witness accounts.

A cause of death for Thorson still hasn’t been established, the Cochise County Medical Examiner’s office said, but Cochise County Sheriff’s spokeswoman Carol Capas said it appears he died of dehydration.

“They had gallon water jugs that were all empty, except for one that was contaminated with leaves and brushes and looked like it was there for some time,” Capas said. That water is being tested for pathogens, she said.

The couple had some dried food items stored just 60 feet down the side of the mountain, but the terrain was so rugged and the pair had become so weak they weren’t able to scoot down to them, Capas said.

Everyone at Diamond Mountain University, the unaccredited institution behind the retreat, “was stunned by Ian’s death, and a feeling of sadness and mourning lingers,” said board secretary Scott Vacek. “I am still almost in a state of disbelief and my heart is very heavy.”
The drama began during a rare break in the retreat on Feb. 4, when participants gathered to talk about what they had learned since beginning their isolation in December 2010.

McNally shocked many in the crowd of 150 when she described “what sounded like repeated physical abuse of herself by her husband, and also an incident in which she had stabbed Ian with a knife, under what she described as a spiritual influence,” Diamond Mountain guru Michael Roach wrote in an open letter.

The stabbing a year earlier had threatened Thorson’s vital organs, the retreat leaders learned, and the couple rebuffed their attempts to learn more about the incident. Board members had previously heard allegations that Thorson had been aggressive toward others at the retreat.

After much deliberation, the board ordered McNally and Thorson to leave the 1,000-acre Diamond Mountain campus near Bowie on Feb. 9, and were provided with a rental car, plane tickets and $3,600 cash.

But the pair apparently decided to try and honor the oath they had taken to stay within the psychic boundary of the retreat, which is located in a box canyon. They began camping out in the small cave in the mountains overlooking the valley, on federal land that nevertheless fell within the psychic “tsam.”

A monk in the Diamond Mountain support staff acted as illicit accomplice, supplying them with food, water and a charged cell phone, according to Roach. In a statement that monk and another posted online, they said McNally fell ill and Thorson didn’t want to leave her to get water. Then he got sick, too.

“Their stock of water ran low and they were too weak to go down from 6000-7000 feet to retrieve water,” monks Chandra and Akasha Prabha wrote. “Unfortunately they were unaware of the lethal consequences of dehydration.”

Diamond Mountain’s board of director had no idea the couple was camping out in the area until McNally called a Diamond Mountain volunteer for help around 6 a.m. April 22, he said. Capas said McNally reported Thorson was “barely breathing.”

A mechanical issue with a helicopter delayed the rescue effort and by the time help arrived Thorson was dead and McNally was just hours from death, the monks say.

In a statement posted on the Internet after they were exiled but before Thorson died, McNally emphasized that the knife-cutting was an accident that came as she tried to practice martial arts. “I simply did not understand that the knife could actually cut someone,” she wrote. But she said one of the reasons she wanted to practice was because of Thorson’s aggression.

Not everyone agrees with how Diamond Mountain handled things. Matthew Remski, a former student, wrote a long post on a website called Elephant Journal questioning why, among other things, the group cast the pair out without seeking a court-ordered mental health evaluation or notifying their families.

Adding to the oddness of the situation is that McNally and Roach — the controversial guru who headed the board that decided McNally and her husband should leave — had a decade-long relationship that made headlines in 2008, when it was revealed they had pledged never to stray more than 15 feet from each other. The couple lived for years in a yurt in the desert without electricity or running water.

McNally is a beautiful blonde New York University graduate 20 years Roach’s junior, and their relationship scandalized some in the Buddhist community. Many did not believe their vows of celibacy and thought that as one of a handful of Westerners to earn the Buddhist title of “geshe,” Roach should had given up his monk’s robes.

Whatever the problems in their marriage, it’s clear McNally was deeply in love with Thorson. In her statement, she called him “my shining light, my Protector and Savior, my entire world.” A self-described lama, McNally is said to be grieving in seclusion, and did not respond to an Internet message.

At Diamond Mountain, the caretaking staff have been struggling with a range of emotions, including guilt, grief, sadness and confusion, said vice president Nicole Davis. They held a ceremony honoring Thorson a week after his death, which seems to have helped.

Roach says he never believed Thorson’s aggression was malicious – just “windmills of unintended physical outbursts” caused by his psychic sensitivity.

The grim irony of a death during a retreat on world peace has not been lost on the Diamond Mountain staff, but Vacek said it will continue. In its first 16 months the Buddhists have overcome other obstacles, including an intense freeze that devastated the water system and a huge wildfire that was only contained by hundreds of firefighters at their doorstep.

The 37 meditators left remain mostly cut off from the world, without Internet, telephone or electricity. They receive can receive packages, but have asked family not to include notes. Caretakers who bring them food generally communicate with them via notes, and Davis said they wrote her one letting the staff know they were okay and helping each other through their grief.

“We have to take a long, hard look at what just went on here,” Davis said. “It can’t be taken lightly, and there are and will be many lessons to learn for all of us. But I have always wanted peace, and these events won’t change that.”

And yes, there is at least one documented case in the medical literature of vertebral artery dissection being linked to yoga — from 1977. Broad discusses this case at length in his book and article. It involves a 25-year-old who liked to be in shoulder stand for five minutes daily, with his neck “maximally flexed against the bare floor.”

(Broad also highlights a 1972 “article” from Dr. W. Ritchie Russell in the British Medical Journal about the supposed dangers of shoulder stand and cobra pose to the “vertebral and anterior spinal artery circulation.” But calling this an “article” is a bit of a stretch — it’s a two-paragraph letter to the editor that really is nothing more than speculation).

Of course, a) most people don’t spend lots of time in shoulder stand on a bare floor so hard as to leave bruises; and b) you can find a lot of weird cases in the medical literature. One woman, for example, suffered carotid-artery dissection — a tear in the other major neck artery — in 1997 after a 32-minute phone call. She held the phone to her right shoulder by flexing her head so she could keep ironing.

Vertebral artery dissection has also been reported after minor neck trauma during a volleyball game and a lot of other activities. As one study put it,

Blunt vertebral arterial injuries remain poorly characterized. The literature is replete with case reports of BVI: participation in athletics (aerobics, boxing, football, jockeying, jogging, judo, paddleball, skiing, swimming, volleyball, and wrestling), being bitten by a dog, undergoing chiropractic cervical manipulation, coughing, “bottoms-up” drinking, getting dressed in a tight diving, “head banging” to music, moving furniture, parking a car, roller coaster riding, scolding a child, seizing, vomiting, performing yard work, and practicing yoga [here the authors cite Russell] have all been associated with BVI. Unfortunately, such bizarre case reports, although interesting, do not provide a scientific foundation on which to establish management policies.

The paper’s authors, surgeons affiliated with Denver Health Medical Center, went on to report that of 38 patients diagnosed with vertebral artery dissection in a 3 1/2 year period, more than half had been involved in motor-vehicle accidents. Others had been fallen from a horse, been struck by a tornado, been assaulted and fallen 30 feet. Serious stuff, in other words.

Similarly, on VertebralArteryDissection.com, there are nine pages with about 70 different personal accounts submitted via email to the site’s webmaster from people — often young and healthy — who have suffered vertebral artery dissection. Yoga isn’t mentioned at all except by two people who said they didn’t practice. “The most worrisome part is ‘why,’” reads one report from a 39-year-old woman. It’s hard to avoid something when the reasons are unknown. I’ve had no trauma, chiropractor work, yoga, etc. … It is hard to get an answer on returning to activities because no one has a good explanation into what caused it.”

There were several people who said they suffered VAD after going to a chiropractor, others who were involved in motor vehicle accidents, one who came down with it coughing and another during a 5K race. But for others like the 39-year-old above, it’s a mystery.

Broad must have known that in order to link yoga and strokes he’d need to rely on more than just a 40-year-old letter-to-the-editor and a medical case study from 1977. So he requested all the records from the Consumer Product Safety Commission’s National Electronic Injury Surveillance System, which receives reports from 90 hospital emergency rooms across the country. Broad writes:

The 2002 survey, like that of any year, gave a brief description of each person and each injury. … The survey listed no strokes — their diagnosis would typically require detailed examinations that went beyong the simple capabilities of most emergency rooms — but several cases listed symptoms that might have coincided with the precipitating damage. “Acute neck pain,” read one write-up. “Collapsed to the floor while performing yoga,” read another.

But — I have the same NEISS records Broad does, and the evidence doesn’t support the scary picture he’s painting. There were two cases of yoga-related “acute neck pain” reported to NEISS hospitals in 2002 — but both were diagnosed as strains, and both patients were treated and released. The 40-year-old woman who “collapsed to the floor while performing yoga” and went to the ER four days later, Feb. 1, 2002, also was treated and released after being diagnosed with a possible seizure.

Obviously, if physicians suspected a patient had suffered a stroke, they wouldn’t be treated and released. From 2002 to 2010, there were only a handful of cases of yoga-related head or neck injuries where the patient was admitted or transferred:

• One 58-year-old woman suffered an intracranial hemorrhage (bleeding within the skull) while practicing yoga March 8, 2006.
• An 86-year-old woman fell and hit her head on a pool table while practicing yoga Dec. 27, 2004.
  She was diagnosed as having fainted, and suffered lacerations and a fracture.
• A 39-year-old woman performing yoga in a highly heated room May 23, 2009, started to experience a headache with loss of vision, tingling and numbness. (The diagnosis code says H/A, which I assume stands for headache, but she was admitted.)
• A 57-year-old woman was accidentally struck on the head during a handstand in yoga class July 22, 2009, and had a worsening headache since.

That’s it — out of monitoring 90 hospitals for eight years, those are the ONLY yoga-related head or neck injuries where a patient was admitted. Even if we assume for the sake of argument that the 57-year-old and the 58-year-old had suffered a stroke — a BIG assumption — that would translate into a national estimate of 30 cases every eight years, or about four a year. And neither of those cases describe the type of neck pain associated with cartoid or vertebral artery dissection (although, to be sure, the intracranial bleeding is certainly very serious).

In his book, Broad later goes on to criticize a 2001 article in Yoga Journal that discussed the possible risk of arterial dissection as it relates to yoga.

The magazine then proceeded to downplay the threat to by failing to put the issue in perspective. It said doctors had found injuries to the vertebral arteries from all causes (such as yoga, beauty salons and chiropractors) to be rare — annaully, a person and a half out of every hundred thousand.

This was accurate. But it ignored the big picture. If twenty million people in the United States did yoga — a standard figure — and if yogis suffered the injury at the same rate as the general population (a very cautious assumption, given all the neck twisting and bending), that meant three hundred yogis in the United States faced the threat of stroke each year, or three thousand over a decade. … Then, in what was apparently meant to be more good news, it added “Death results in less than 5 percent of the cases.”

Here again, the figure is correct but misleading because it failed to put the number in perspective. If three hundred yogis in the United States suffered injuries of the vertebral arteries each year (the lowball estimate), 5 percent of that would be fifteen — fifteen yogis who lay dead after wounds to their vetebral arteries resulted in brain injuries serious enough to kill. And the real number of fatalities, despite the percentage being ‘less than’ five, was probably higher given the large number of poses in yoga that involve extreme contortions of the neck. Maybe it was thirty fatalities annually, and maybe three hundred over a decade. Globally, the fatalities might number in the thousands. It was an open question.

The flaw in Broad’s logic is so obvious here, it’s astonishing the man is a science writer. Putting the figure in perspective involves not calculating the number of yogis who suffer arterial dissections — but the number of yogis who suffer arterial dissections related to yoga. I mean, it’s tragic if a yoga practitioner falls off a horse and tears a neck artery — but that has nothing to do with yoga.

Broad could just as easily compile a scary list of the hundreds or thousands of yogis who die each year in automobile accidents. What’s relevant isn’t the total number of injuries or deaths to practitioners — it’s the additional risk, if any, posed by the practice. And so far, Broad hasn’t presented any evidence that yoga practitioners do suffer strokes at a greater risk than the general population.

Last week, Broad gave an interview to the blog Well + Good NYC in which he was asked about the controversy:

Okay, but one of the most common criticisms of the excerpt is that you didn’t compare the rates of injury to other physical activities and that the number of injuries was so small that it was overblown.
I know. People say, these injuries are similar to sports injuries or injuries you get from any physical activity, and I go, ‘Really? Strokes? Parts of your brain dying? People dying from strokes?’ This type of stroke kills about one in twenty people — they’re one of the most serious injuries you can suffer, and they’re not associated with running, or even football, which does have a record of brain injuries.

This is wrong on two levels. First, there are more documented cases in the medical literature of people suffering artery dissections after running or playing football than of practicing yoga. (Playing tennis and golf, riding roller coasters, sneezing and severe coughing been also linked to vertebral artery dissection).

Second — it’s just ridiculous for Broad to assess the risk of yoga based on one very rare injury. Yoga isn’t associated with heart attack, while running is, for example. To put risks in their proper perspective, you have to look at the full spectrum of serious injuries, and even exercise-related deaths … here’s a grim list of all the exercise-related fatalities reported to NEISS hospitals from 1997-2010. (Mostly heart attacks from jogging or working out).

Basically — the bottom line is — yes, you can probably suffer a stroke from twisting or putting pressure on your neck in certain yoga poses. But you can suffer a dissected artery sneezing, painting a ceiling or riding a roller-coaster. Overall, all of these activities are very safe. Ignore scaremongers like Broad and go out there and live your life!

One element of the story was particularly interesting to me — the idea of tracking emergency-room admissions related to yoga. It turns out the data is all online! And I’ve been able to analyze it to come up with an idea of just how dangerous yoga really is.

First, some background. Since 1971, the U.S. Consumer Products Safety Commission has made arrangements with a statistically representative sample of about 100 hospitals nationwide to send in emergency-room admissions data to keep track of consumer products injuries — a system called the National Electronic Injury Surveillance System.

In 2010, for example, 69 people visited hospital emergency rooms in the NEISS system after injuries involving “extension or straight ladders” — which the CPSC estimates means there were 4,024 such injuries nationwide. (The NEISS uses a weighted sample technique to create a geographically balanced national estimate, so depending on the institution, each actual ER visit in the sample creates between 5.3 and 76.6 “statistical visits” in the national estimate. More detail here.).

In 2000, the program was expanded to include all injuries, not just those related to consumer products — making it a valuable tool for public health officials and professionals.

Yoga isn’t tracked separately, of course, but the data includes a brief narrative from the emergency-room staff of how each injury occurred. I was able to download all exercise-related data from 2002 to 2010 and, using Microsoft Excel, exclude all the cases — the vast majority — that didn’t mention yoga. [1]

This is what I found. First, each year there are a few thousand yoga-related emergency room visits nationally — and it doesn’t seem like there’s been a big increase since 2002. There was an average of 1,794 yoga-related ER visits a year from 2002-’10, my analysis of the NEISS data found. (These include any cases where the word “yoga” is mentioned, including some where there’s other possible causes of injury — e.g., someone who was lifting weights and practicing yoga, and later felt back pain). There were a total of 436 yoga-related ER visits to the 90 NEISS-affiliated hospitals over those eight years, making for a national estimate of 16,150 yoga-related ER visits from 2002-’10.


Second, most yoga-related ER visits are for fairly minor injuries. Of those 16,150 estimated ER visits, 95 percent were treated and released.

About half of all cases involved sprains or muscle strains. (Here’s the diagnosis of the actual cases, because the national estimate starts getting unreliable the thinner you slice it).

There were just a handful of serious cases:

• One 62-year-old woman suffered a heart attack Oct. 10, 2009, after doing yoga.
• A 5-year-old and a 13-year-old suffered concussions, a 7-year-old suffered a lacerated spleen and 11 other people — mostly kids — were injured falling off, tripping over or even fighting over “yoga balls” (I’d never heard of such a product, but but some Swiss balls are apparently marketed as such.)
• There were 23 broken bones, including five toe fractures, five wrist fractures (from falls), and a 51-year-old Asian woman suffered a cervical spine fracture — a broken neck — on June 13, 2008. (The narrative just says she “injured back, performing yoga,” with no further details).
• One 58-year-old woman reported March 8, 2006, that while in yoga class she “felt a ripping sensation in brain [and] passed out.” She was diagnosed with an intracranial hemorrhage, or bleeding in the skull, and admitted.

Other cases seemed exceedingly minor, like the 71-year-old woman who visited an ER after she “was doing yoga and was in a position which made her dizzy which she was concerned about.” She was diagnosed with a case of dizziness — I wasn’t sure if this was a dry attempt at humor or not. There were also five people who went to the ER for what were diagnosed as headaches.

Then there were some weird cases:

• A 66-year-old man went to an ER April 16, 2010, complaining of pain “from doing ‘drunk yoga.’” He was diagnosed with a right hamstring pain.
• A 58-year-old woman, on Dec. 3, 2008, “was trying a yoga move while intoxicated and injured back.” Lumbar strain.
• A 33-year-old woman Dec. 10, 2003, was “teaching yoga barefoot and stepped on something — foreign body in foot.” Ow.
• On Aug. 8, 2005, a 28-year-old woman accidentally kicked in the face during yoga class was diagnosed with a broken nose. Again, ow.
• On June 26, 2007, a 45-year-old woman was “riding bike to yoga class when yoga mat caught in wheel of bike causing fall head first to cement.” Eeep. Suffered “abras lip/tooth contusion.”

And this case was sad: A 62-year-old woman, on Jan. 18, 2010, with “history of backpain physician told her to take a yoga class — after yoga — pain actually got worse.” She was diagnosed with a strained lower back.

For the record, 78 of the 436 cases — 18 percent — occurred at home and so were probably unsupervised. The lower trunk was the body part most frequently injured, followed by the upper trunk, the knee and the neck.

Overall, though, yoga was very safe compared to other forms of exercise.

There were 30 times as many emergency-room visits in 2010 related to running than yoga! And 12 times as many where the word “gym” was mentioned. (The raw numbers also included eight exercise-related fatalities, all from heart attacks, and all where the victim had been working out or jogging). Of course, this doesn’t take into account the relative popularity of these practices, but it’s still telling I think.

And for people who want to use these numbers to justify their own laziness — keep in mind that you can be injured just about anywhere, including IN BED! There were an estimated 218,619 bed or bedframe-related emergency-room visits from people aged 17 to 70 in 2010 alone, according to NEISS. Most were from falling out of bed, but people were also hurting rolling around in bed and, in a handful of cases, stung by scorpions. It’s a tough world out there.

THE TL;DR VERSION: Yoga is comparatively very safe, but you can certainly be hurt doing it. Be careful letting kids horse around on “yoga balls,” of practicing “drunk yoga” and of letting your mat get caught in the spokes of your bike if you ride it to class. But get out there and do something!

1. I checked my methodology with Tom Schroeder, director of the CPSC’s division of hazard and injury data systems. He told me in an email,

What you did was correct. The only caution I would give is to consider more words than just ‘yoga’. Misspellings in the NEISS are common. Your annual estimates are valid although we do give caution that estimates under 1,200 are somewhat unstable (but still valid) and may fluctuate greatly from year to year.

I considered these misspellings for yoga (joga, yuga, etc). but didn’t find anything.
Google Docs spreadsheet I created listing data can be found here.
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There’s just one problem. Until now, no one has bothered to look at the labor-market statistics that Rosin has used to make her case.

I did — and found many of her claims were misleading or even untrue.

Women aren’t a majority of the workforce, nor are they most of the nation’s managers; 1 in 5 men are not “out of work”; and women don’t dominate 13 of the 15 job categories expected to grow the most in the next decade.

These aren’t small errors — taken together they form the crux of Rosin’s argument. Hannah Rosin and The Atlantic owe American men everywhere an apology.