Houston Strategies

Indiscriminate fitness magazine picks on a new city this year

Now Chicago is the fattest city instead of Houston, according to the completely random and arbitrary criteria of Men's Fitness magazine (WP with national rankings, HBJ with Texas specifics, Chronicle on Houston), which ranked the Top 25 Fittest and Fattest Cities out of a group of 50. We dropped to #5, behind #4 Dallas. I'd trumpet this, except their judging system is so out-of-control from year to year it has no meaning.

LA moves from 21st fittest to the third fattest city in the country in one year? Did the entire city go on an eating binge or exercise strike for some reason?

Phoenix moves from 12th fattest to 15th fittest in one year? Atlanta moves from 23rd fattest to 16th fittest? Baltimore wins this year's award for the fittest city, when they were 25th fattest last year? (not to mention ranked 93rd out of a 100 by rival Men's Health) Do we believe some epidemic of fitness consciousness broke out in these cities? Half the Washington Post article makes fun of the result. It's almost as if the magazine editors toyed with their judging criteria and formula until it got a winner no one believes - a sure fire way to get lots of free publicity, which, of course, is the point of doing these lightweight rankings anyway: to sell more magazines.

Here's what they had to say about Houston's four-place improvement:

"I'm proud of you guys," said editor Neal Boulton. "You're down to five ... It takes an enormous effort to go down that much from that height."

Oh really? If it takes "enormous effort" to move four places, what kind of effort did it take in those cities like Phoenix, Atlanta, and Baltimore that moved between 11 and 26 places? Did they ban unhealthy foods at the city limits and require their citizens to jog to work every day? Or, more likely, did Men's Fitness slightly tweak their judging criteria which completely re-sorted the rankings? (as arbitrary formulas often do) Sounds like the "enormous effort" was a couple equation changes in an Excel spreadsheet. Note to ranking groups: if a minor change to your formula radically changes your rankings, it's a sign your formula is very, very suspect.

And what do they have to say for themselves?

"How could such a turnaround be possible in the span of a year? Men's Fitness editor Neal Boulton is quick to point out that the survey is far from scientific..."

Well, at least they're being up front about it. But every year the press eats it up. What's the criteria for newsworthiness here? Maybe somebody should start a couple new sets of annual rankings:

• Top 25 Most Meaningless Annual Rankings
• Top 25 Media Outlets That Will Publish Any Meaningless but Fun Statistics Sent Their Way
  

That might create some helpful public pressure. Well, unless they use indiscriminate criteria and arbitrary formulas and can't get published, but it doesn't look like that will be a problem.

posted by Tory Gattis @ 7:52 PM