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January 4, 2010
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A snowboarder catches air at a resort in Maine. A recent Dartmouth report reveals that resorts report an average of 23 percent more snow on weekends than during the week.
Researchers at Dartmouth College have confirmed something that skiers and snowboarders have long suspected: Resorts sometimes boost their snowfall reports to attract more customers.
Eric Zitzewitz and Jon Zinman are both associate professors of economics and fans of snow sports. In their report, Wintertime for Deceptive Advertising, they found that ski areas report more snowfall on the weekends, and that there is no such "weekend effect" in government weather data.
Zinman says they gathered snowfall totals from ski area Web sites and then compared those numbers with government weather data. According to Zinman, resorts reported 23 percent more snow on weekends. And the resorts that had the most to gain by fluffing up their numbers did more of it.
According to Zinman, resorts with more people living within driving distance inflated their numbers more, as did resorts that don't offer money-back guarantees.
The researchers didn’t single out specific resorts in their report, choosing instead to make broad statements about the industry as a whole.
Michael Berry, president of the National Ski Areas Association, says that snow reports at resorts aren't exactly done scientifically. He says a worker with a measuring stick typically checks snow levels once a day.
But in the age of Facebook and Twitter, he also says these traditional snow reports are becoming less important. Today, many skiers are getting information from their friends who live near resorts. So Berry has advice for his colleagues.
"If you try and create a reality that you perceive to be the truth, it better be consistent with the reality on the ground," Berry says. "The consumer will remind you of that instantly if that’s not the case."
Zinman saw evidence of this in his research. During the study period, an iPhone application was released that allows skiers and snowboarders to report conditions themselves.
"Once that came online, exaggeration by resorts fell very sharply," Zinman says. "And [it] fell all the more sharply at resorts that have good iPhone reception."
Bob Berwyn, a longtime Colorado journalist who covers the ski industry, was fired last week after colliding with Vail Resorts over a column about, um, snow. The circumstances that led to his job loss are full of twists and turns, like a particularly brutal giant slalom course, but let’s just say it involves a large ski resort company, Twitter, secular changes in marketing, along with barometric and advertising pressure. More plainly, his firing suggests that vulnerable publishers, under pressure as the noose on advertising-supported print seems to tighten, are willing to groom away the moguls if that’s what they think the advertiser wants.
On Nov. 19, Mr. Berwyn wrote a column for the Summit Daily News that included a long tutorial on weather dynamics and then took a turn into a discussion of how the ski industry played a role in hyping snowfall. To wit, snow in one area of the Rockies does not promise fresh chutes of powder in another.
“All these factors are often forgotten when the ski industry hype machine switches into overdrive. During an upslope storm a few weeks ago, an industry P.R. person appeared on the Weather Channel in a short clip that was filmed near Genesee, where it was snowing heavily. During the segment, there was no mention of the fact that the weather was actually mild and dry just on the other side of the Continental Divide — were the ski areas are.
About the same time, a top resort executive based in Broomfield posted a picture of the snow on his deck to Twitter, eliciting a response from a Breckenridge resident, who pointed out, correctly, that it was warm and sunny in the mountains. The industry leader later said that snow is snow, wherever it is, and that it helps get people excited for the season.”
The “top resort executive” who tweeted the early bonanza was actually Rob Katz, who runs Vail Resorts, a company that owns five large ski areas. On Oct. 10, Mr. Katz was elated that it was already snowing and tweeted a picture of his deck in Boulder. Mr. Berwyn felt this constituted “hyping” snow because the snowfall and the picture was a long ways from the resorts that host skiing.
Mr. Katz told Decoder he always gets excited when it snows and he was just sharing his elation, not suggesting that ski resorts, including the ones he runs, were already drowning in snow in October. He called Mr. Berwyn and in an off-the-record conversation said he was angry about the column. He also called Jim Morgan, publisher of the Summit Daily, to share his displeasure.
At this point, Twitter comes schussing back down the hill. Mr. Berwyn tweeted: “Got reamed by ski co. but good feedback from skiers & community … a disconnect?”
And then a Breckenridge town councilman, Dave Rossi, entered the Twitterdome and suggested: “vailresortsnews blowback (calls SDN publisher!?) over cheeky criticism (& tweets) 4 snow mktg shows thin skin.”
Mr. Katz felt that his off-the-record chats had been made public and decided to pull his advertising from the Summit Daily News.
“We did not pull our advertising because of a bad story,” said Mr. Katz in a phone call last week. “We advertise in many outlets that write stories we don’t like. We just felt that there needed to be a private channel of communication where we could express our concerns and that those private discussions had been made public. It goes to the issue of trust.”
He also added that his company is pivoting away from traditional press in terms of advertising dollars and putting more time and money into social media because that’s where the skiers are. He speculated that publishers are having trouble with the new paradigm and are scrambling to make ends meet.
Two weeks after the column ran, Mr. Berwyn, a longtime reporter for the Summit Daily News, was fired, prompting this blog post by Susan Greene in The Denver Post last week:
“That decision is chilling not only for journalism in Colorado, but also for Summit County readers.
“It’s unfortunate but, especially in this economy, some advertisers feel like they can flex their muscles when there’s commentary that they don’t like,” says Ed Otte of the Colorado Press Association. “Newspapers need to withstand these kinds of threats.”
Mr. Morgan, the publisher of The Summit Daily News, then wrote a column saying that Mr. Berwyn’s firing was not the result of pressure from Vail.
“The reason Berwyn was terminated — and I have to be careful here because it is a personnel issue involving an individual — was not because of the column or because of the resulting fallout from it,” adding, “As would be the case with any employee, if there are circumstances symptomatic of a pattern of behavior documented in reviews over the course of time, then changes result. That’s what occurred here.”
Whatever Mr. Morgan is telling himself or his readers, it seems more likely that Mr. Berwyn was fired for writing a column about the weather, generally the least controversial (and often boring) topic a writer can get her or his hands on. His sacking over a meditation about snow is sort of Zen and horrifying at the same time.
When we contacted Mr. Berwyn about the snow country contretemps via e-mail, he didn’t have time to talk because Arapahoe Basin just got a nice little dump of about a foot of snow. Decoder commends his priorities. Later on Monday, fresh off the hills, Mr. Berwyn sounded pretty philosophical about his disenfranchisement. Apart from hitting the mountain when he wants to, he is using his newly emancipated status to start a news site, Summit County Citizens Voice, but that doesn’t mean he’s buying the version of events put forth by his former employer.
“Rob Katz did not ask to have me fired,” he said. “He pulled his advertising and I think that my publisher failed to back me on a column that my editor signed off on.”
“When it happened, my publisher said that I had a lot of groveling to do,” Mr. Berwyn said, adding, “He told me that we were X amount of dollars off budget and that Vail’s decision was going to make it even harder to reach our numbers.”
One budget number they won’t have to reach is Mr. Berwyn’s salary now that he’s out of a job.
“I’m sure that if you went through all of my performance reviews, you come up with this or that thing, but in general, I was reviewed as a stellar journalist who has covered a wide variety of challenging beats,” he said.
If you are still with us at this point, you’ll be unsurprised to learn there is a plot thickener. Decoder wrote a post a few weeks ago describing how a blog post at Ski magazine about a fatal accident at Breckenridge had been pulled, suggesting that pressure from Vail Resorts, which owns Breckenridge, was behind the move.
Megan Miller, the editor who made the move at Ski magazine, suggested in a note to the staff obtained by Decoder that advertising pressure played a role:
“My understanding is that we’re not in a position to stand up for free speech at the expense of dough right now, so, with a queasy stomach, I unpublished it. I suppose it would be prudent for our editors to skip death stories unless there’s a really important reason, so we can avoid this kind of indignity.”
Mr. Katz said that Vail was merely concerned about issues of taste if their ads appeared next to a story about a fatality and pointed out that the Breckenridge resort issued a press release about the tragic death. He added, “There is no pattern here. We don’t believe that advertising can buy good editorial.”
Mr. Berwyn recalled that when he wrote a story for the New West Web site a few years ago that included some criticism of Vail Resorts, he was told by his bosses at The Summit Daily that he’d better take the post down even though it was written for another publication. He demurred.
Decoder got the feeling from talking to Mr. Berwyn that he probably doesn’t manage up that well, but is a deadly serious, committed journalist. He certainly has an excellent reputation, in part because he has covered all manner of issues in the peaks and valleys of Summit County since 1996. As a longtime mountain man who keeps a notebook in his ski parka, he has a broader theory about the forces that are at work.
“There has been a long tradition in ski towns, and here in Summit County, of cozy relationships between the ski industry and the press,” he said. “The thinking seems to be that we all depend on this one industry and one sport for our livelihood, so we should do everything we can to keep the ski industry happy.”
“Beyond what happened to me, I’m concerned because this is a small community paper that is dependent on a narrow advertising base and who is to say the next advertiser won’t try the same thing?”
