When I hear the word "math" my eyes glaze over. I probably shouldn't admit this — but I have my degree and my job so to quote Steve, "who cares" — I only had to take one math class in college for graduation and I had to take the same course twice. I failed the first time and I like to blame the fact that I used my cellphone for my calculator, but honestly I just don't get math.
Despite me not liking math I do have a cautionary tale of why journalists should know math:
At my college newspaper we published an article about the plans for a new building. At our newspaper we had a pretty extensive editing process, and by the time we sent the copy to the printers the article would've been read at least 5 times (sometimes more). Well, when our digital version emailed out our EIC got a text message from the university's president at 6 a.m. (never a good sign) saying the reporter made a big mistake in the article and was wondering if we could fix it online immediatley and then run a correction in our next issue. It turns out the measurements for the new building were very off. This building was going to be a big, expensive art museum and the measurements we published would've made this museum the size of a mobile home. None of the editors double-checked this. When we all saw the measurements we were reminded of story problems and all of our eyes glazed over.
Dana Savage
Innovations High School
Salt Lake City
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