--distance (in miles/km and time) from your city to provincial/national
capital and principal cities of the world
-- average number of calories consumed per day for residents of your nation
-- annual production (either in area or amount) of the five largest food
crops in your nation
-- the amount (and balance) of trade between your nation and its five
largest trading partners (bonus: which commodities contribute most to that
trade)
-- average annual rainfall in your city

wc


Wendell Cochran
Division Director, Journalism
American University
202 885-2075



"Tom Johnson"
<tom@...
m> To
Sent by:
JAGIS-L@yahoogrou cc
ps.com
Subject
[JAGIS-L] 25 numbers every
08/07/2006 04:17 journalist should know
PM


Please respond to
JAGIS-L@yahoogrou
ps.com






Friends:

My apologies for the cross-posts, but....

For an upcoming presentation, I'm putting together a list of the 25 basic
statistics every journalist should know, at least withing a range of plus
or
minus 5 percent. This list would, ideally, be a template that could be
given to journos in any country so that he/she would always be ready to put
many stories in context. Below is a rough beginning. I wonder if you might
have some data points of a similar vein that you find useful?

THE 25 NUMBERS EVERY JOURNALIST SHOULD KNOW
*) The world's population
*) Your nation's population and as a percent of the world
*) Your state/province/district population and as a percent of your nation
*) Your city's pop. and as a percent of your state/province/district
*) The percent of change for all of the above in the past 10 years
*) The current budget of your nation/state/province/district/city
government
*) The sub-sections of the above budgets for health, education, public
safety, infrastructure and their relative percentages
*) The world's live birth rates and same for your
nation/state/province/district/city
*) Average life expectancy for males and females in your
nation/state/province/district/city
*) Average family size for your nation/state/province/district/city
*) Per capita and per family annual income for your
nation/state/province/district/city
*) Average years of education for males and females in the world and your
nation/state/province/district/city

Many thanks. I'll post the roundup of the suggestions.

-Tom Johnson
--
==========================================
J. T. Johnson
Institute for Analytic Journalism -- Santa Fe, NM USA
www.analyticjournalism.com
505.577.6482(c) 505.473.9646(h)
http://www.jtjohnson.com tom@...

"You never change things by fighting the existing reality.
To change something, build a new model that makes the
existing model obsolete."
-- Buckminster Fuller
==========================================

[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]





[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]