Good news media know how to make numbers interesting

Many journalists know the best way to start researching a story is to find the data. Of course data have problems, but if everyone can agree at least on the numbers, you can start to get at the truth. Calling the Grand Poobahs for comment should be the last part of truth-gathering.

Data-driven reporting is kind of a buzz word in the news business, especially now that website technology provides beautiful ways to display and interact with numbers and graphics on tiny screens.

The Reading Eagle has missed this boat. Jason Brudereck is good at crunching Census numbers. Weather stats are sliced and diced to reveal surprising facts about Berk’s micro-climate.

But the use of graphs and charts is mostly ploddy in the print edition, and basically nonexistent on readingeagle.com.

The irony is that the Eagle’s crew of young reporters has probably studied data-driven reporting in college and would love to incorporate it. One drawback is it does take time.

But good journalists know they don’t have to wait for potentially self-serving officials to make proclamations to find out the facts. 

For example, the headline on a story in January was “Serious crime down sharply in city, chief says.”

“Crime statistics released Tuesday by the city for 2013 and the 20 years prior certainly challenge that notion [that Reading has a growing crime problem],” the story said.

In reality, nobody has to wait for City Hall to release crime stats. Anybody can find extremely detailed, up-to-date crime figures at the state police website.

For example, in 2013 in Wyomissing, 14 people were charged with possessing marijuana, including seven juveniles.

Good reporters would find and make sense of the data themselves and then ask the crimefighters about the results, rather than having these mystical numbers revealed to them from on high.

The Eagle always starts with the unemployment level in its monthly job reports, with data “revealed” by the state.

But the number of jobs in Berks over the year, and the number of people actually working, would be better facts to start with, and could lead to some good interviews with local officials. 

Evan Jones did a good job highlighting this in his May story. He quoted Ed McCann, chief operating officer at the Berks County Investment Board: "Obviously, there's pretty good progress, but an issue is still the shrinking labor force."

Again, the state provides huge amounts of data about jobs that Eagle reporters could mine to find out the truth about life in Berks, but they seem to be spending more time writing about loser race horses and car shows.

The Berks coroner releases a report every spring about how people die in our county.

How many drug overdoses have there been? Suicides? What are the trends? Is the average life span here going up or down?

It’s fun and revealing to plumb numbers to find facts about our community.