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·      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
                                                 [Wendell Cochran, American University]

·      Add in racial and ethnic groupings, homeless/housing character (rent/own, size), language, age, religion, business characteristics, gross domestic product, largest businesses, largest employers (the latter two are often not synonymous), macro-crime rates, major political parties, voter registration and recent political outcomes.

·      The rate of change is at least as important as the current or historical raw number, and you need both to provide context.

·      The list needs to be adjusted for one's beat(s). It makes no sense to ask a cops reporter to spew out business numbers without end, but he damned sure ought to know that murders have increased for four of the last five years.
                        [Pierce Presley, Master's Candidate, University of Memphis]
 

·  Homicide rate                                  

·  Cost of Living for your city compared to nation                               

·  Average Wage in your city/state/nation                             

·  Average commute time to work (in minutes) compared to state/nation    

·  Median home price for your city compared to peers (similar sized cities)       

·  Which industry employs the largest proportion of your county/state/nation's population?  (In Indiana, we rank 1st in the nation for manufacturing.  But that's a double edged sword. In other words, how industry-dependent are you?)

                                                 [Carol Rogers, IUPUI, Indianapolis, Indiana]                 

·      Para temas de seguridad: cantidad de policías en actividad en mi ciudad y cantidad de delitos contra la propiedad por mes o día (promedio) [Under the category of security: the number of active police in my city and the daily or monthly average number of property crimes]

·      Para temas de salud: cantidad de médicos en ejercicio y cantidad de camas hospitalarias [Health care: the number of practicing doctors and the number of hospital beds.]

·      Para temas judiciales: cantidad de causas penales por juzgado y cantidad de funcionarios judiciales por juzgado [Legal system: the number of criminal cases by court and the number of employees in the court system.]

·      Para temas de contaminación ambiental: cantidad de monóxido de carbono en  el aire que respiramos para la ciudad en la que vivimos [Environment: the amount of carbon monoxide in the air in our city]

·      Para temas de tránsito: cantidad de accidentes de tránsito por día, cantidad de automóviles circulando por día y de multas labradas a los infractores por día (promedios) [Transportation: the average number of traffic accidents per day; the average number of cars on the city streets and the average number of tickets/fines per day.]

·      Para temas electorales: Cantidad de votos emitidos en elecciones pasadas por partido politico [Elections: the number of votes cast, by political party, in past elections.

            [Sandra Crucianelli, journalist and CAR trainer, Bahía Blanca, Argentina]
 
 

·   Unemployment.  Worldwise it is something like 1/3 ( if that isn't gun powder I don't know what is)
                                      [Jenny Quillien, FRIAM,  Santa Fe, New Mexico]
 
 

·      GDP -- $13.2 trillion as of the second quarter of 2006, in current dollars (source: http://www.bea.gov )

·      The U.S. civilian labor force: 151.5 million Employed: 144.3 million, Unemployed: 7.2 million, Not in the labor force: 77.4 million,  (source: http://www.bls.gov ) It's also useful, of course, to know these figures for your state/locality.

·    The number of households in the U.S.: 105.5 million, as of Census 2000 (again, the local number is very useful)

·    U.S. median household income: $44,473 (three-year average, 2002-2004) (only 19 of 50 states are above this, by the way) (source: http://www.census.gov

·      Largest US corporation, by sales: Exxon Mobil, $339.4 billion in 2005. Largest by assets: Citicorp, nearly $1.5 trillion. (Source: Fortune magazine)

·      Also, a useful math trick is the Rule of 72, a quick way of calculating how long it will take something to double in size.  That is, if something is growing at X percent a year, divide X into 72 to get the number of years it will take to double. So, a city growing at 8 percent a year will double in 9 years.
                                                        [John Byczkowski, Cincinnati Ohio]
 

·   Per capita water (gallons per day) and energy consumption (kilowatts per year) in your country and how they rank versus other countries and global average

·      Water consumption % by sector: industrial, agricultural, domestic

·      Proportion of oil, gas, coal that is imported in your country

·      Proportion of imports of all food consumed ($ and KCals)

·      Energy consumed per unit of GDP (kilowatts per $ of gdp) and comparison

·      Per cent of GDP spent on defense and national ranking

·      Crime rate matrix: gender by race/ethnicity by age range

·      Per capita income matrix: gender by race/ethnicity by age range

·      Current level of forestation of your country and what it was 100 years ago.

·      Geographic size of your land mass of the earth, your country, state, county, town

·      Basic unit conversion from mass to volume: water = about 64lb per cubic foot

                                               [Jim Rutt, FRIAM Group, Santa Fe, New Mexico]
 

I'd suggest working this question from the perspective of readers/viewers.

·  The price of a bus ticket/monthly pass.

·  The unemployment rate in your country/state/province/city.

·  The cheapest interest rate you can get for a mortgage in your reporting area and your federal government's overnight interest rate (the Fed's rate for  the U.S.; the Bank of Canada's overnight rate here)

·  Your country's trade surplus/deficit

·  The operating surplus or deficit of your national, regional, and local government.

·    The debt of your national, regional, and local  government (and can you clearly explain the difference between the debt and the deficit)

·   The percentage of eligible voters that actually exercised their franchise at the last national, regional and local election. Bonus points if you can say if that percentage is up or down compared to the previous election!

·    The price of a litre of milk and a litre of gas in your area and the national/regional/local average of those goods. (I know you Americans buy gas by the gallon, but what is it for milk - a quart?)

·   The salary of your top municipal/regional/federal politician and the salary of the top bureaucrat in each district.

·   An average of mean temperature for your reporting area yesterday and how hot/cold it was a year ago. Five years ago? Ten years ago?

·      How much income does a household have to have in your area to avoid being labeled as "poor"?

·   I've found that, for survival in a newsroom, it's always a good idea to always know your circulation/viewership now and what it was a year ago.
                                                                                        [David Akin]
 

·  Rate of inflation in the local economy.

·  Exchange rate of relevant currencies.

·  Whatever the reference interest rate is locally

·   Year-to-date returns of the local equity market's index

                                                                       [Bill Alpert, Sr. Editor, Barron's]
 

·  Population make-up by race, ethnicity, etc. for your community?
                      [Jeff Parrott, Projects reporter, South Bend (Ind.) Tribune]
 

Here's a couple of numbers every journalist should know:

·   The phone number to the library

·   The phone number to the help desk at the Census Bureau

                                                                                                  [Jodi Upton]
  

·  The circumference of the earth (25,000 miles).

·   The mileage on your car.

             [Teresa Meikle, News Researcher, The Press Democrat, Santa Rosa CA]
 

·    A good idea of the normal curve, such that education reporters wouldn't make a big deal about moving from the 48th to the 53rd percentiles with one year's testing;

·    A rough idea of converting units (mph to feet per second once got me a great nugget in a story)

·  A general breakdown of national race and trends (more Hispanics than blacks, for the first time, not so many years ago)

·  A general idea of long-term debt obligations, which has gotten USA Today some great stories and almost certainly deserves a greater focus by other news organizations:
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2004-10-03-debt-cover_x.htm
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-05-24-retiree-taxpayers_x.htm

                                                                                                [Mike Stucka]
 

·      Percentage break-downs based on income and age.

·      Current rate of home ownership, as well as the rate 5, 10 and 20 years ago.
                                                                                                   [Liz Carey]
 

·    World population: 6.5 billion

·    Comfortably crowded together= 65 billion square feet = 2,331 square miles.
                                             [Mark Houser, Pittsburgh Tribune-Review]
 

NB: “A multiple choice quiz given before almost every semester’s class for the past couple of decades.  Very few students have any conception of the relative sizes of the different ethnic/racial/religious groups in the American population and typically over-represent African Americans, Jews, and (more recently), Latinos.”  

· What is the total population of the United States today?

·  American Indians comprise what percentage of the U.S. population?

·  What percentage of the U.S. population is Asian American?

·  What percentage of the U.S. population is non-Hispanic white?

·   What percentage of the U.S. population is African American?

·   What percentage of the population is Hispanic or Latino?

·   What percentage of the American people is Jewish?

·   What percentage of the American people is Roman Catholic?

·   In 1860, immediately prior to the Civil War, what percentage of the total African American population was free?

·  Which is the most rapidly growing ethnic category in the U.S. today?

·  What percentage of the U.S. population today is foreign-born?

Answers, except for religion, found at census.gov
              [Prof. Norm Yetman, American Studies and Sociology, Univ. of Kansas]
 

·      Some measure of broadband penetration for the US, for the most wired countries, and for the area you cover.
                           [Barbara K. Iverson, Journalism - Columbia College Chicago]

Numbers that let you explain numbers in ordinary terms:

·   The number of gallons in a typical swimming pool. (Around 15,000 gallons, give or   take.)  Very useful to describe oil, toxic waste spills. 100,000 gallons equals enough oil to fill nearly seven swimming pools.

·   Another from Doig the Elder -- the space occupied by a single person in a loose crowd, 10 square feet, or so. Good for counting crowds and deflating overwrought crowd estimates.

·  The number of ball bearings that fit in a box car, roughly a billion. Good for explaining "parts per billion." 

·   Numbers that let you make on-the-fly measurements. U.S. currency is six inches long. So you can measure feet. Your outstretched arms are roughly equivalent to your height. Figure out your stride so you can pace off distance. The top of your thumb, from middle joint to end, is roughly an inch. Index fingernail is roughly a centimeter. 

·   Basic metric conversions: Meter=39 inches. Kilometer= 5/8 mile. Inch = 2.54 (I think) centimeters. Ounce = 28 grams. (That one is second nature to those of us who came of age in a certain generation.)

                                                    [Neil Reisner, Florida International University]
 

·   (“Credit for the 10-square-feet-per-person rule goes to a Berkeley j-school professor in the '60s whose name I'm embarrassed to have forgotten but who wrote a CJR article in about 1968 on the mechanics of crowd-counting. I've used it a lot.”)

·      Two steps of your stride is roughly your height, or so I learned in Boy Scouts a century ago. And to get a good approximation of kilometers, multiply miles by 0.6 (or by 6 and then move the decimal place over one to the left.)

·      One other useful formula: The sampling error margin on a poll is pretty close to 1 divided by the square root of the size of the sample; therefore a random sample of 100 respondents has an error margin of plus or minus 10 percentage points.
                                                              [Steve Doig, Arizona State University]

·  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
                                                 [Tom Johnson, IAJ, Santa Fe, New Mexico]