2005.07.16
Newspaper Statistics
Thinking about my last post on the odds of dying in a terrorist attack, I started thinking about how the media harps on and on about things like shark attacks or school shootings than they do about people contracting diabetes or dying from alcohol and/or drug abuse. I know that things like this are not good stories. “Man diagnosed with cancer, news at 10.” Yet this is what is news: information that gives you a clear idea of what is going on in the world. Yet the media needs drama to drive sales. The more outlandish the story, the greater the human interest, the better the income. OK, who am I to deny that?
Wouldn’t it be great, though, if a newspaper had one page -or even one column- devoted to statistics.
Category Number Change Since
International
Population: 6,537,133,558 (one week) +4,863,287
Births: 2,845,897 (yesterday) -12,873
Deaths: 2,109,341 (yesterday) +9,198
Deaths from famine: 596,478 (yesterday) -508
Preventable deaths: 1,209,675 (yesterday) +7,792
Shark Attacks: 1 (one month) +1
Highest Temperature: 113 (yesterday) -3
Lowest Temperature: -48 (yesterday) +9
National
Population: 293,614,955 (one week) +8,187
Births: 83,123 (one week) +943
Deaths: 68,095 (one week) -1,374
Deaths from AIDS: 236 (yesterday) -10
National Debt: $6,736,610,719,431 (yesterday)+$2,721,850,729
Arrests: 909,476 (one week) +9,873
Gallons Gasoline: 827,160,672,478 (one week) +784,371,790
Shark Attacks: 0 (one month) 0
Highest Temperature: 98 (yesterday) -3
Lowest Temperature: 21 (yesterday) -8
NYSE Close: $7403.59 (yesterday) -$5.98
All statistics there, by the way, are made up. You get the idea, though. I realize many of the numbers I’ve chosen are kind of negative but there’s no reason not to include some other positive, funny and/or trivial numbers in there, like the dog population of the USA.
Like I said this wouldn’t be jammed on the front page, but there are a lot of us that would love to have this information. If the right categories were picked you could even start drawing conclusions about the world we live in. The end of the year would be a cinch to set up as a year in review. Many categories would remain the same day by day, but depending on the current “news” many would change to give more information. For example in the above example there was a shark attack in South Africa in the news.
I’m just brain dumping here, but I think it’s not a bad idea. Many of the statistics might even be aggregated from various sources making compiling easier for the editors. Blah blah blah.
UPDATE 2006.10.01: Unfortunately my carefull crafted chart up above lost all of its formatting. Stupid web interface for Wordpress…
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