The Magic Number

22575. What does that number mean to you? It feels like the total number of hours spent learning shorthand but actually that number is journalism. Let me explain…

Last week we had a lecture by Glyn Mottershead, our online journalism tutor here at Cardiff School of Journalism, who gave us an overview of Computer Assisted Reporting (or CAR as it is fondly known across the World Wide Web).

CAR, is not, as Google suggests, “a motor vehicle with four wheels”, it is in fact the process of using data and figures to produce a news story. There is a marginally more developed definition here and a fantastic overview here.

At first, lacking the possession of a maths brain, or truth be told, any desire whatsoever to plough through a bunch of numbers, CAR seemed to be a bit dry, and well, down right dull.

However, as Glyn pointed out CAR is actually pretty darn useful. It is about how to find information, how to evaluate it and then how to communicate it.It might be more time consuming than traditional journalism, but looking at data allows us to get to the bare bones of a story. And that is when the skeletons really start dancing out of the closet.

Take the expenses scandal for example (which incidentally has its very own page on Wikipedia). Although it may have been The Daily Telegraph who actually broke the story, journalist Heather Brooke had been tirelessly campaigning for MPs expenses to be in the public domain. There’s a fantastic article by Heather on The Guardian’s website here where she says about her first attempt to access the information:

“Well, the expenses duly came out. But they were bulk figures in various categories: travel, staff, second homes etc. I wanted the detail. That’s where you find the truth.”

I couldn’t have put it better myself. CAR is about looking at the figures, and the figures are about the cold, hard, facts. As pointed out in the lecture, it is hard to argue against numbers, and they can be analysed to delve right to the bottom of a story and find the truth.

As it so happens, number 22575, or more precisely £22575, is the cost of the second home claim made by my former local MP Andrew MacKay. Mr Mackay resigned after it was revealed both he and his wife, Julie Kirkbride, also an MP, claimed parliamentary expenses for both of their homes.

The expenses scandal showed you cannot dodge the numbers and it stands as a great example of what computer assisted reporting can do.