In "Where Home Prices Rise Steeply, Bankruptcies Fall," Ford raises some interesting -- and appropriately inconclusive questions -- about the relationship between real estate prices and the number of bankruptcies. And we're given a nicely colored map of U.S. counties and their changes in bankruptcy rates, 2000 to 2005. The quartile scale is huge: zero to 35 percent and greater than 35 percent, both up and down. The problem is there are no hard numbers to put the bankruptcies in context related to county population. And one or two counties down in southeastern Arizona have a greater than 35 percent decline in bankruptcies, but we know they have very sparce populations.
"OK," you might say, "there's simply no room to put all those numbers in the newspaper."
Right, but they surely could be put online in a variety of ways. If there were three bankruptcies in 2005 and two in 2005, that's pretty close to a 35 percent decline, but hardly statistically significant.
I'm sure this isn't Ford's fault; he has the data and is probably far more aware of its analytic pitfalls than we are. But editors -- Editors! -- have to begin thinking of stories as having many fascets, and work to deliver the richest amount of data as possible that is related to the stories and their context.
