Numbers in a Story Increase Credibility

Writing a news story with numbers is a balancing act.  I do a whole lecture on writing with numbers, so important is the topic.  Do you go for precision?  Or do you instead rely on broader terms, like "most" or "half" or some similar shorthand? 

For most pros the answer is somewhere in the middle.  Lead with the summary words for readability and then follow with the precise numbers.  An experiment reported in the latest Newspaper Research Journal looks at words versus numbers and what it means for perceived credibility of the news stories.  The result?  Hardly surprising.  Using numbers instead of broad terms does indeed increase the perceived credibility of the various articles.

For most pros this is not an either-or choice.  You might lede by saying the majority of Americans think this way or four-out-of-five Americans think that way and then you'd come back, fairly early on, with specific numbers.  But in these Twitter times, when news can be condensed to 140 characters, then numbers can improve credibility.  And probably cost fewer characters.

Study cited:  Koetsenruijter, A. W. M. (2011).  Using numbers in news increases story credibility.  Newspaper Research Journal, 32, 74-82.

Are Poll Details a Good Thing in a Story?

More information is better, or so goes the standard rule of thumb, especially when reporting the results of a public opinion poll.  AAPOR (full disclosure, I'm a member) and other organizations often suggest technical poll details a journalist should include in a story, such as margin of error, number of people polled, etc. 

And then comes along my latest copy of Newspaper Research Journal with two studies about polls.  Here are the titles of each:

• Regular Readers Expect More Polling Details
• Too Many Technical Details Hinder Recall of Poll Results

So with the first study, we learn from an experiment that regular readers expect details in a poll story and miss them when they're included.  But in the second study, also an experiment, we learn that lots details hinder how much people recall of a poll story.

How do we explain the differing results?

The first study examines perceptions, plus the results really work only for regular readers of a newspaper, not everyone in the experimental study.  The second study looks at recognition.  The more details, lower the knowledge.  Fascinating.

Both studies look at a species very much like human beings -- college students.  So the generalizability of the results can certainly be questioned, but I suspect the latter finding on learning has more to do with information overload, especially for this group, then anything else.  The journalism guy in me, despite these results, still favors putting as much technical information as is reasonable in a story about a poll -- particularly if the poll is about something important. 

Newspapers and Knowledge

PR release for Newspaper Research Journal article that finds more or less the usual thing, that young people have dropped the paper over time. The authors used ANES data from 1948-2004 (which has crappy media items in the cumulative data set, particularly problematic in 1974). Here's an intersting bit from the release:

The researchers conclude that “because young Americans rarely read newspapers anyway, the lack of using [the] medium does not affect their political knowledge.”

Full disclosure: I'm on the editorial board of NRJ.