News Writing (Fall 2017)

Don’t just engage with what I blogged about Blue Feed, Red Feed. Investigate the site for yourself, and engage with the conversations you see happening around you.

We are coming up on a brief “Math for Journalists” unit.

Journalists often work with percentages.

If in 2015, I ate 20 donuts, and in 2016  I ate 40 donuts, what do you have to say about each of the following statements?

• I ate half as many donuts in 2015 as in 2016.
• In 2016, there was a 200% increase in the number of donuts I ate.
• There was a 50% decrease in the number of donuts I ate in 2015 as compared to 2016.

Math for Journalists

Khan Academy:

• averages,
• percentages,
• more on percentages
• mean, median and mode (though “mode” is not that relevant to journalism, it is part of this lesson)

From the Columbia Journalism Review:

Almost every story contains a number, be it a statistic, an address, or someone’s age. Journalists deal with numbers every single day, and yet so many of us willingly profess ignorance or fear when faced with simple arithmetic. This fear combines with a lack of training to rank numerical errors among the most common mistakes made by journalists. I have an ever-expanding archive of these errors.

But it’s time to recognize that handling and interpreting math and numbers are some of the cornerstones of journalism. “As newspapers and news magazines chart a new course for themselves where they have to explain rather than just report, what’s happening is that our reliance on math and numbers becomes even more important, rather than less so,” Maier said.

I’m asking you to post a response that demonstrates you have read and reflected on the whole article (not just the excerpt above). Please consider especially the short list of different kinds of numbers-related errors that crop up in journalism.