Errors Add Up

Richard Holden of the Dow Jones Newspaper Fund mentioned an error he noticed last week in The New York Times, which the paper subsequently corrected.

From Rich. . . The best, most recent example involved the recent sales tax increase in New Jersey to 7 percent from 6 percent. The Times referred to it as a “1 percent increase.” ... Of course, it was a 1 PERCENTAGE POINT increase. It was a 16.7 PERCENT increase. Seven minus six is one; put the one over the six (old number) and that’s what you get.
I always tell people the easiest way to remember is that any time you’re talking about differences between percents that difference is expressed in percentage points. You see it all the time in ads for loans, where they’ll say something like the rate is 4 percent above the prime rate when they really mean percentage points.

But the days when we could joke about going into journalism because we didn't like math are over, or should be. I count (!) myself in the crowd that used to say that.

As Bob Baker of Newsthinking said, ...We pay them (reporters) to be good at making sense of the world--which includes expressing simple mathematical relationships. And yet, a frightening proportion of otherwise smart reporters turn sluggish when it comes to using the kind of math that they were supposed to have mastered in high school.

Errors range from the minor to the large and can result from either the journalists' lack of understanding of the material or failure to catch errors made in the source material.

Dozens of sites exist to improve basic math skills we may have had or lost, or faked our way through, or simply forgot.

Among them:

John Allen PaulosWho's Counting column for ABC-TV.

The American Press Institute's Writing With Numbers page.

ASNE

The Wall Street Journal's The Numbers Guy.

Robert Niles' Stats for journalists.

American Press Institute

News University

Here's a little cheat sheet on percentages.

IRE's Math Test for Journalists, by Steve Doig, who credits the inspiration of Phil Meyer at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

If you're a little rusty, take this eighth-grade math test to feel extra stupid.

And here's an odd little piece last year from Business Week about blogging, journalism and math.