Most reporters are not mathematicians.
I certainly am not. That is why I ask questions when it comes to stories involving those pesky numbers that made me cringe in college. Recently, I spoke to a Johnston County town manager to get clarification on estimates involving a water project.
After a few minutes, the town manager obviously seemed annoyed with me. I guess my math skills were not clicking as fast as he would have liked. His tone of voice changed, he sighed loudly several times over the telephone and made a remark that he could not have explained it any easier to me.
Sorry, but I did not go to college to become a math whiz. Numbers take me a little bit longer to comprehend than vowels and nouns. I could have just gone on my assumptions, printed the numbers and got everything wrong. But instead, I went straight to the source, asked a few questions, got the right information and wrote my story.
I guess the town manager didn’t see it that way.
