To report, blog, analyse or commentate you need to be across data, and much of it is going to be quantitative. Journalists increasingly have to have at least minimal competence in understanding stats and data, if they are going to do a creditable job.
So what would the basics look like? Here’s a Minimum Statement. Minimum is the word. No one expects journalists to be senior wranglers. Their skill set has to include imagination, presentation …words. But too often journalism educators have left numbers out. And the result, some would say, has been impoverished reporting of social police, crime, science, climate change …fields where you need to be able to assess risks, calculate proportions and (most important) spot other people’s errors and exaggerations.
Recent figures show applications by students living in England to study at university from this autumn are down, and there’s interesting comparative data from Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. But one year’s figures could be a blip. A mite of caution is a basic requirement – the alternative is breathless enthusiasm for any given set of figures, with the risk of misleading readers, viewers and listeners.
Take a look at our dozen or so cautionary points and let us know if they sound like the basis for a journalistic career in the 21st century.
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In response to your request: “let us know if they sound like the basis for a journalistic career in the 21st century”, the short answer is no – nor were they the basis for a journalistic career in the 20th century, either.
As someone who worked for 15 years on various Fleet Street newspapers, I have to say that the checklist you provide would lead to a very brief career, as it ignores the Prime Directive of Newspaper Journalism: getting stories that your rivals don’t, or at the very least, not missing stories that everyone else runs.
Very early on in my career, I decided not to cover a story because my scientific training led me to be deeply suspicious of it. The following day, the Daily Mail had a two-page feature on it – and I was rewarded with the threat of redundancy from my editor for missing out on a story run by a rival, and a bit of friendly advice from the deputy news editor: “Sometimes you can know too much”. In other words, don’t get all prissy about the science if you suspect your rivals will be less fussy. I usually tried to get around this by calling a professor somewhere and getting him/her to say what baloney the story was, and hope the caveats didn’t get cut out by a sub-editor. I wasn’t always successful.
With media outlets under more financial and competitive pressure than ever, the idea that journalists put scientific precision before covering their backsides by getting a story into print can, I’m sorry to say, most charitably be described as naive.
Rules of thumb are most helpful if they are easily learned, easily applied and give good value. How do other journalists evaluate this advice?
One of our most valuable assets as journalists is credibility.
I worked for more than 17 years in newspapers in the U.S. (most recently as a graphics director) and cannot count how many times I had to educate reporters and editors in the most basic of statistical concepts.
On one occasion, I was asked to graph crime numbers for a new police chief’s tenure. I was told to show an increase over the course of five years. The problem was that crimes peaked in year three and made significant declines thereafter — just not to the the level of year one.
The city editor insisted that the graphic had to support the the stories assertion that the police chief’s policies had been a failure. I had to escalate the fight through multiple layers of management to the paper’s editor to force a re-examination of the story.
That day, I “saved” my paper’s reputation. But I quit soon afterword without another prospect. It was one of the best career decisions I ever made. My insistence on statistical accuracy made me a better graphics reporter and, eventually, a better editor.
I currently work in a graduate journalism school and we are grappling with how to incorporate exactly the things you list into our curriculum.
The bottom line is journalists who don’t understand statistics can be manipulated by them. And telling inaccurate stories because of ignorance ruins our credibility.
Our readers deserve better.