Jay Bryan on the merits of math as a journalistic tool

Dawn Wiseman

Leo Gervais (Journalism) can strike fear into the hearts of his students — or at least some of them. All he has to do is mention math. “Some tell me they chose to study journalism just so they’d never have to do math again.”

Jay Bryan (Journalism) understands where they are coming from. The Gazette’s business and economic columnist admits he’s “always been afraid of numbers,” and never pursued math formally beyond the requirements of high school. Then, somewhere along the way, he “blundered into business journalism and found I enjoyed it.”

Both Gervais and Bryan teach their students that a little math can go a long way.

Gervais touches on math in one lecture of his first-year Writing and Reporting course. “I tell students it’s important,” he said. Then he gives them an assignment where they have to deal with numbers.

He admitted that as much as the students struggle, so do many professional journalists. “When the Quebec PST went from 6.5 to 7.5 per cent, I saw many articles which said it was a 1 per cent increase in the tax. It was actually a 1 percentage point increase that upped the tax by 15 per cent. Percentage change is a pretty powerful concept to understand.”

Bryan agrees. “If you can get a handle on basic arithmetic, percentages and ratios, you pretty much have everything you need in order to determine if a business is a success, and why,” he explained.

He discovered that getting to the heart of a company’s annual report (or a federal budget) requires “ignoring the pretty pictures” to focus on “the boring stuff.” The lists of numbers, footnotes, graphs — all the stuff your eye just glosses over — “hide what they don’t want you to see. As a journalist, that’s exactly what you’re looking for.”

Bryan (who now teaches editorial and column writing) said that when he was teaching business journalism, students usually ended up in the final-year class “by glossing over the parts of the course description they didn’t want to see.” He and another professor who teaches opinion writing split the class in half and switched groups half way through the term. “Twice a term I got a group of students whose faces fell when they realized we were going to talk about numbers and economics.”

To counter the fear and loathing, Bryan began by focusing on the journalism. “I don’t expect them to learn sophisticated analysis, but I do expect them to learn how to think, how to draw a conclusion based on logic and how to research facts … and sometimes that involves math.” To help with the resulting anxiety, he provided a number of basic strategies.

For instance, he suggests that two key questions to ask CFOs are ‘How much did you sell this year?’ and ‘How much did you sell last year?’ “If profits are growing faster than sales, then you know the company is either taking advantage of the customer or holding costs down.”

Bryan also teaches the tricks and deceptions of graphing, such as expansion or compression of horizontal and vertical scales. This practice can make small gains look quite large, or large losses relatively small.

He said the Wall Street Journal, “the gold standard in business journalism,” is frequently guilty of having graphs in which one or both scales start not at zero, but halfway up a sequence. “It’s an exaggeration to show the movement of whatever is being measured,” he explained, “and it’s dishonest.”

So far, Bryan has managed to win over most of the students in his class. “Some just aren’t interested,” he admitted, “but the big job is getting them to move from nothing to something.” When students realize the power of basic math they “get exhilarated. I love it,” said Bryan, “and I love being able to share.”