Numbers in the newsroom

Two good reminders that we too often get carried away with numbers without providing context, and especially, proper context.

• "On the Media" led last week's show with an interview with Michael Blastland, co-author of "The Numbers Game," and a book I intend to get on my desk as soon as possible. Blastland and host Bob Garfield throw back and forth on the absurdity of some of the numbers being used ($700 billion bailout, $50 billion fraud) without giving people some sense of their context. Blastland suggests that perhaps that $700 billion isn't so bad at all when compared with the economy's total broken down per person.
• In response to a Poynter E-media Tidbits post about this week's dam break and spill of coal fly ash across part of the the western Tennessee landscape, one reader challenged the rather common comparison of saying things like it was equivalent to almost 800 (average) Olympic-sized swimming pools. I think the commenter, Alex Dering, has a good point: First, unless there is a standard depth for an Olympic pool, "average" is rather suspect. Second, most people see Olympic pools not as volume but as surface area. I think that's very important - when we use comparisons, we need to use them as people recognize them, and sometimes people do not "see" all dimensions. (Example: You have a 200-foot-deep well whose opening is 6 feet across. To most people, that's perceived as a 6-foot-wide hole (with the accompanying area dimensions generally understood) and not a 1,200 7,200-cubic-foot cylinder (though I am using the word "cylinder" here, you can see from my numbers -- and thanks to Pete for outpointing the mistype -- that I conceived of it more square. I suppose I could have used "column" instead. If, indeed, you take it as a round hole, the volume's about 5,600 cubic feet, as Pete points out.) When we run into huge numbers, we risk losing all sense of proportion anyhow because there is little on Earth to compare with which we have direct knowledge. (And, as the critic points out, saying something will stretch x times in relation to distance to the moon basically still just produces "gee, that's a large number.")

I've found that time is perhaps the one thing that people identify with that can still reasonably handle large numbers in a way that gives an idea of what is at stake. Some handy conversion factors:

• 86,400 seconds in a day
• 604,800 seconds in a seven-day week
• 31,536,000 seconds in a (365-day) year.

So if the government spent a dollar per second, it would take almost 22,200 years to spend all $700 billion. (As Blastland also said, per-person comparisons can work will in some cases, too, but only when the amounts bear some reasonable relationship to the average person's economic condition.)

The new world of news

Everyone is a publisher now.

The State newspaper found that out today -- apparently somewhat to its surprise -- when South Carolina's health and environmental regulatory agency posted two interviews its officials recently had with two State reporters, both summaries and audio (although some of the audio is missing because of "bad batteries").

The Department of Health and Environmental Control apparently feared a major series on its operations was coming out this weekend -- last word I had was that it wasn't -- and so took the first shot.

While the agency might have been hoping to get the drop on the newspaper, this isn't exactly burning issue stuff, so I can't see a whole lot of people rushing to read it. It's pretty policy wonk. But it does give the DHEC PR staff, which is one of the most responsive in the state but also has shown itself able, when needed, to craft a luscious nonanswer to a question in a moment's notice, a place to point if any deep questions do come up. Read the Web site, they can say.

It's a strategy being used by more PR shops these days. Welcome to the new world of news where everyone is a publisher. What I told the reporter who called -- expect to see more of this. Nothing you do is a secret anymore. Now, reputations won't be made on control of information but on whether you provide the best, most nuanced and contextual information out there.

Are we ready for that, or do we keep doing commodity news?

Now, you know what the paper should do it if wants to show it can play in this new sandbox? Link right back to the DHEC post. It shows its readers it has no fear of its reporters' work, and it's the digital age way of saying "bring it on."