training

As journalism students look for deeper approaches to reporting on their campuses, they might consider the world of academic research, which can provide both fresh ideas and important perspectives. Sometimes studies are used directly by journalists in their stories; in other cases, they’re a way for reporters to educate themselves about issues and to locate and tap into networks of experts.

Far from being recent acquaintances, mass journalism and high technology have long been inseparable companions. When the London Times installed the first steam-powered presses in 1814, they not only quadrupled the speed of page production, they also vastly increased the paper’s reach and power. Later advances such as cameras, telegraphs and telephones — to say nothing of computers large and small — only deepened the relationship between the press and technology.

Was Oakland the nation’s most dangerous city in 2013? Or was it Oakland and Flint? What is a valid distinction, statistically speaking? We show the uses of a “confidence interval.”

The following is an essay developed from the new book Informing the News: The Need for Knowledge-Based Journalism, which serves as companion to Journalist’s Resource and represents an articulation of the project’s mission to help the news media transition to a new phase in their 21st-century development.

The notion that journalists are math phobic and prone to error when working with numbers is an age-old cliché, embodied in the quip that, for many in the media, the plural of anecdote is data.

The notion that journalism should become more data-driven — and get a little closer to social science — is not a completely new idea. The journalistic sub-field of computer-assisted reporting, embodied in the work of the Investigative Reporters and Editors’ NICAR program, has a long history.

When assessing academic studies, media members are often confronted by pages not only full of numbers, but also loaded with concepts such as “selection bias,” “p-value” and “statistical inference.”