Chapter objectives

This chapter provides an understanding of the following issues:

• The importance of numbers in nearly all stories

• How to use simple formulae to calculate percentages, means, medians, modes and other number manipulations that are useful

• Why news polls are often no more than a rough guide, and how they can sometimes be very unreliable

• Why spreadsheets are your friend

The chapter sets out particular areas where journalists need to take extra care. It is easy to stumble if you are not careful. Knowing about such things as percentage errors, means, averages, medians, modes and standard deviations could be vital if you are to report meaningfully. Understanding polls might also be critical. A knowledge of spreadsheets will allow you to read other people’s data and help you construct your own.

Number-crunching: A necessary skill

The news ‘ticker’ is now just a museum piece, but the constant flow of statistics, facts and figures is still a feature of news information today. In almost every serious story – from global warming to mid-year fiscal balance sheets – there are numbers that need to be crunched, punched and teased into a meaningful narrative. People attach great importance to knowing ‘the facts’, and figures have a special significance for many. But they are also easy to misread, misunderstand and manipulate. That’s why you sometimes hear the phrase ‘Lies, damned lies and statistics’, first coined by Benjamin Disraeli, Prime Minister of England in the late 1800s.