Circular Reporting

I've spent more than my fair share of time on the North Jersey Coast Line trains into and out of New York and Newark over the past thirty years. (The trains leave Manhattan by heading west, so the trains to the shore are said to be westbound, even in Matawan when they are heading southeast. NJ Transit gives you a polite hint by posting signs saying "Eastbound to New York" and "Westbound to Bay Head.") You can take the train to the plane these days, or head to Broadway or Monmouth Park racetrack. NJ Transit does a good job getting a lot of people where they need to go these days.

Friday afternoons in the summer months, though, the outbound trains from New York and Newark are crowded with tourists heading down to the shore, where they stay at rentals and hit the beaches and bars. I remember the young travelers strategizing how they planned to move from one shore town to the next when the one closes its bars an hour earlier than its neighbor. It was all very scientific. And since the party had already started on the train, it was also pretty annoying.

These tourists have come to be known pejoratively among shore residents as Bennys. The origin of the term is obscure, but there is no lack of opinions for what the term means. The New York Times ran a light community article a few years ago and it seems to have taken root as the unquestioned source for the origin of Benny as an acronym for Bayonne - Elizabeth - Newark - New York. A number of sites adopted the definition soon thereafter, so now the Wikipedia article is citing them all as proof of the meaning of the term. No one seems to have bothered to check to see that Bayonne was never a stop on the New York and Long Branch Railroad, the predecessor to the North Jersey Coast Line. Seems more likely to me that the Bay Head terminus, the last stop on the New York line since 1881, makes a much better choice for the Benny acronym. All the more since Bay Head was originally named Bayhead, so a BNY train ticket seems quite probable.

I've just suggested on the Benny talk page that they've gained false confidence in this Bayonne idea due to circular reporting. The publications seem to all use the same source and inappropriately magnify the analytic confidence. After all,the NYT reporter just talked to a few folks in Bradley Beach, probably on the beach or in a bar. It doesn't look like the reporter did any digging for hard evidence in the Asbury Park Press newspaper archives, and who knows if the fact-checkers even bothered to check sources on such a fluff piece.

Circular reporting is a constant threat when doing research. That threat makes careful documentation of sources that much more important. On top of that, one of the sources cited in the Wiki article is a compendium of sources, a sort of bibliography with snippets from the original articles. It is a nice tool but inappropriate as a footnoted source since it has no original content. Some of the links were dead and others traced back to dueling bloggers arguing over third person reporting and what they felt were common customs at the Jersey Shore. Such sources aren't credible or verifiable. Many alternate ideas for what Benny means are out there and probably should be rendered in the Wiki article.

The most annoying train rides are actually the evening rides towards the city, when music fans are heading to a concert at Madison Square Garden. They typically bring a case of beer and roll half-empty cans down the aisles and make a lot of noise. I guess they are for New York City residents the annoying equivalent of what the shore residents have to put up with at the beach. No doubt the city folks have a terse name for these typically disgusting revelers, but it is unlikely to be an obscure acronym.