News by the Numbers

In the grand scheme of things, most journalists rank numbers somewhere below cockroaches. If the truth be told, a good number of us chose journalism as a college major because it allowed us to avoid math courses.

Something about the inclination to write flatly contradicts an interest in things quantitative. We're into words, not numbers.

And yet, as Victor Cohn points out in "News and Numbers," we're ultimately forced to deal with math anyway. "We journalists like to think we deal mainly in facts and ideas," says the former Washington Post science editor, "but much of what we report is based on numbers."

Anybody who thinks about it has to agree. Government budgets, economic forecasts, environmental studies, unemployment figures, housing starts -- the whole flow of daily news is shot full of numbers.

That gets more true every day. The march of science and the computerization of government mean that counting things becomes more and more fundamental to the process of daily life. Just compare the quantity of numbers generated by the 1990 census compared to any census that's come before.

The problem with that, from our point of view, is that most of us aren't terribly good with numbers. Our distaste for figuring led us to avoid the study and practice that gives more mathematically oriented folks such ease with numerical procedures. And maybe we just lack the talent. Plenty of journalists received verbal SAT scores that were 30 or 40 percentile points above their quantitative scores.

But that doesn't relieve us of any journalistic obligation. Numbers are critical to public policy-making, and if we don't do a good job reporting them, we abdicate a large part of our watchdog role.

Furthermore, many of our readers aren't any better with numbers that we are. That sad fact reinforces our duty to do a solid job of sifting through the numbers generated in the public arena, extracting the newsworthy figures and presenting them in the clearest, simplest way possible. The last thing we want to do is confuse readers with cloudy statistics and quantities that don't allow for easy, number-by-number comparisons.

Besides, numbers bog down the text. Loading a story up with numbers almost guarantees low readership. And so does a story that forces readers to do their own math to figure out what we're saying. Few members of our audience turn to The Oregonian because they're craving a good story problem.

Most of all, we want to get our numbers right. Far too often our attempts to deal with numbers just don't add up.

That said, here are some general principles that should help us do a better job of what most of us like doing least:

• Do the Arithmetic
  Rivera was 46 on July 4. A native of New York, he was graduated from Brooklyn Law School and practiced law, representing the poor, until 1960.
  
  Anything's possible with Geraldo, but it doesn't seem likely that he was practicing law at the age of XX. The other problem with this passage, of course, is that the writer didn't tell us when the king of the trash journalists started practicing law. The word "until" suggested that we were reporting a range. But we should never report only one end of a range.

  Think about it. It will take a damned fast boat to get past that bridge.

  
  
  
• Visualize the Thing the Numbers Describe
  The John Day drawspan bridge has a center section that pivots 180 degrees to allow boats to go through. Yeah? Think about it. It will take a damned fast boat to get past that bridge.
  
  
• Use Comparable Forms
  Three-quarters of college students reported monthly alcohol use in 1990, compared with four-fifths in 1980.
  
  Quick! Which is bigger -- three-quarters or four-fifths? How much bigger?
  
  We should never force readers through such mental gymnastics. Three-quarters is 75 percent. Four-fifths is 80 percent. Once we start comparing apples with apples, the comparison starts to make some sense.
  
  And it also reveals that college drinking habits didn't differ all that much between 1980 and 1990. Depending on the sample size, in fact, the apparent difference may have been a statistical artifact. But we didn't report the sample size or the margin of error. So who knows?
  
  You'll pay some fees -- about 5 percent of each $100 you put into a stock fund for instance....
  
  Well ... better overkill than no kill at all. But the fact is that a percentage is a way of simplifying comparisons by converting everything to base 100. If we express something in terms of a percentage, there's no need to break it down per 100 of the original quantity. It's simply 5 percent of everything you put into a stock fund.
  
  The reverse is also true. If you express things in terms of 100, you have no need for a percentage. It's $5 for each $100 you put into a stock fund.
  
  
• Make It Meaningful
  Police and fire rescue crews diverted traffic around the roadblock, which was estimated at 1,000 cubic yards, or about the size of a house.
  
  Hooray! Here's a writer sympathetic enough to readers to understand that most of them have absolutely no idea how much 1,000 cubic yards of landslide might be. The simple comparison with a volume we all understand made the size of the slide understandable.
  

  Give readers a break by expressing the unfamiliar in terms of the familiar.

  
  Let's remember that most of us don't really understand how much a billion is, or 5,000 acre-feet, or 20,000 board feet or any number of other large and/or unusual quantities. Give readers a break by expressing the unfamiliar in terms of the familiar.
  
  
• Use Only What You Need
  In all, conservation groups sought to halt 421 proposed national forest timber sales containing 2.5 billion board feet of timber. That's more than half the 4.8 billion board feet the U.S. Forest Service plans to sell on the 13 national forests in Oregon and Washington this year.
  
  The point of this passage was to indicate the scope of the environmentalist attack on logging. So what are the critical figures? To some degree, that's a judgment call. But you can make a good argument that all readers really needed to know was that the conservationists wanted to stop more than 400 sales containing more than half of all the timber the Forest Service planned to sell in Oregon and Washington. Adding all the other figures just detracts from the central point without contributing anything terribly meaningful.
  
  
• Minimize Density
  -- Stacey King scored 23 points and made a key three-point play with 1:01 left Wednesday night as top-ranked Oklahoma beat Kansas State 86-82, the Sooners' 28th consecutive victory.
  
  -- In Renton and Everett, Wash., 27 new Boeing Co. commercial airliners roll out of mammoth buildings each month as the company tallies a 1,528-plane order backlog. In Gresham, in a much lower profile building, about 1,940 Boeing Commercial Airplane Co. workers produce about 7,500 different parts for those planes, each part destined for a particular plane scheduled to roll off the line sometime in the following 18 months.
  
  The Gresham workers are a small portion of the commercial airplane unit's 60,000 employees and even a more minuscule percentage of the entire Boeing work force of 157,000, of whom 101,000 work in the Seattle area.
  
  The Seattle work force should grow slightly to 102,000 by mid-1990....
  
  -- A 30-year-old Molalla man has been sentenced to 20 years in prison with a 10-year minimum in the death of a 16-month-old boy who died of head injuries three days after the baby was in his care. (raw copy)
  
  -- The $6.8 million corrections funding bill would pay for a half-dozen prison construction projects, including about $205,000 for planning a 500-bed medium-security prison that will be the first phase of a new prison complex that may eventually house as many as 3.000 inmates.
  

  As a general rule, more than three numbers in a paragraph turns the copy into sludge.

  
  As a general rule, more than three numbers in a paragraph turns the copy into sludge. Usually, you won't have a problem if you use only the numbers you absolutely need. The Boeing story is a case in point. Who really needs all that detail about numbers of planes, parts and employees?
  
  But the main point here is that when you must use more than just a couple of numbers, you spread them out. Keep the density down to a number or two per paragraph.
  
  Note, too, that all but the last of the examples listed here was a lead. Filling a lead with numbers is like nailing a locked gate on the front of the story.
  
  
• Simplify
  ... the Golden State will have 52 representatives in the House, seven more than in the 1980s. That's the largest delegation, and, at 12 percent, the largest share of House seats held by a single state.
  
  Numbers have one great virtue. They're almost infinitely malleable. They can be collapsed, converted and simplified in a dozen different ways. For many news developments, in fact, you only need one hard number. Everything else can be expressed in terms of comparison with that base. In other words, you express things in ordinal terms -- explaining that some things are bigger or smaller than others without necessarily explaining exactly how much bigger or smaller.
  
  The story on California's congressional delegation, for example, built everything around the base number 52. It didn't include the number of California representatives in the 1980s. And it didn't include the total number of House members. Instead, it expressed things in relative terms. The writer did the work for us, and we only had to read the numbers that counted.
  
  
• Avoid Excessive Detail
  -- In 1984-85 the first full year of programs, the district spent $112,000. The budget for this year is $326,109 -- $6.15 for each of the 52,996 district students. That's .11 percent of the district's total $310 million general fund budget....
  
  -- ... the "dent" in the sun will be larger in the Northwest, where 54 percent of the sun's diameter will be blocked by the moon in Eugene, 55 percent in Portland and 56 percent in Seattle.
  
  -- The fairview Budget Committee Tentatively approved a $1,730,592 budget Monday..., one that is 1.63 percent larger than last year's $1,702,716 budget.
  

  Wouldn't we be better off giving round numbers that readers can understand instead of burying them in an avalanche of detail?

  
  We're often excessively precise. Does a dollar or two -- or $2,000 -- really make that much difference in a million-dollar budget? Wouldn't we be better off giving round numbers that readers can understand instead of burying them in an avalanche of detail?
  
  Instead of the smothering detail in the first example, for instance, we could have said that the district's $325,000 budget is three times larger than in was five years ago, but that it's still only a little more than $6 for each of the district's nearly 53,000 students and less than a thousandth of the district's general-fund total.
  
  And what's a percentage point when it comes to the sun's surface? Suffice it to say that, when viewed from the Northwest, the moon will block more than half the sun.
  
  And that Fairview approved a $1.7 million budget Monday, up less than 2 percent from last year's.
  
  
• Be Fair
  In January Joe Uris, a longtime Portland activist, contributed a Forum piece that analyzed the way the Portland School District cooked the charts to make improving black student scores on achievement tests more dramatic than they really were. It was, said Uris, "a classic example of distortion through the use of a statistical model."
  
  Uris was absolutely right. What the district did -- and what we passed along to our readers -- was to create a graph that ran from 30 percent to 80 percent on the vertical axis instead of 0 percent to 100 percent. That made the line depicting the increase in scores over time seem steeper.
  
  Furthermore, the district graph distorted the time periods depicted by the horizontal axis. It collapsed a seven-year period of gradual improvement in black scores and made it approximately equal to a two-year period of minimal improvement. That increased the slope of the already distorted improvement curve even more.
  
  The result of all this? We passed along school district propaganda, even though we had the figures we needed to create a more accurate graph.
  
  We're used to the way politicians and bureaucrats hedge their words to make themselves look good. Because we're on guard and savvy to the politics of the language, we usually protect readers from the most self-serving versions of the truth.
  
  But we're much less critical when it comes to quantified information. In our hearts we know that XX. But when it comes to actually doing the math, we're often at less than our best. Still, our fundamental obligation is to bring the same skepticism to numbers that we do to all the news, especially now that so much of the news is numbers.

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