Greg Packer Effect

Greg Packer, a highway maintenance worker from Huntington, New York, made a hobby from 1995 of being the quotable member of the public: first in line at launches, signings and inaugurations, and always giving his real name. He was quoted in hundreds of articles, and in 2003 the Associated Press circulated a memo noting that a Nexis search had turned up around a hundred mentions and instructing reporters to be equally eager to find somebody else. That June he had been the centrepiece of a New York Times street interview on public feeling about Hillary Clinton's memoir. Three things sustain the pattern and only the first is laziness: the source wants to be found, and the organisation wants an opinion it can rely on arriving on time.

In practice

• A chief executive tells the board he has sounded out the staff and they are behind it, having spoken to one friend on the fifth floor.
• A council that consults the same three residents' association officers every time has a consultation process and no idea what the estate thinks.

Possible explanations

The explanation is cost: sampling opinion is expensive and a known, quotable source is cheap, so the reliable respondent displaces the representative one. Editorial deadlines make the substitution routine rather than deliberate.

In its favour

The Packer case documents the journalistic version in detail, and news organisations have since issued instructions against using him, which is an admission that the substitution happened.

Against it

It is a coinage for this ledger rather than an established term, and the wider organisational tendency it names, of one convenient source standing for a population, has not been measured.

Standing

A coinage for this ledger rather than an established term. The Packer case documents the journalistic instance; the wider organisational tendency it names has not been measured.

Subject

Communication & Media

Essay

Theories of what stands between an event and its audience