Transcript News Releases Published on Special Occasions Ida Repovž Grabnar UNECE Work Session on Statistical Dissemination and Communication September 2006

News Releases
Published on Special
Occasions
Ida Repovž Grabnar
UNECE Work Session on Statistical
Dissemination and Communication
September 2006
Statistics is the mirror of society when:
• objective, transparent and politically independent
statistics is applied in the country
• statistics is for whatever reason not objective and
is biased, but the media play their key role by
disclosure of “intruders in statistical system”
Role of media in dissemination
Media as the most effective dissemination channel
of statistics to ordinary people:
• describe facts and figures by transferring them
from statistical to more understandable language
• simultaneously promote official statistics
• judge the statistical office and its work, in view of
their integrity, independence, transparency of the
statistical system
Journalists
Code of Ethics of Slovenian Journalists
The first principle states:
•
•
the public has the right to be informed
the journalists have the right of to express their
opinions, which can be implemented by free
gathering, disseminating and transmitting
information.
Double role of journalists
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•
censors of the state institution’s behavior with
strong power in creating public opinion
simple human beings possessing limited
educational background in statistics, with whom
special care is required in maintaining
professional and open relationships
The need of journalists for statistics
•
•
•
in corroborating their assumptions or just to
illustrate issues in articles
in informing public about pertinent, up-to-date,
important or interesting statistics
in informing of unexpected, “shocking” news
about statistical office
Statistical literacy among journalists ?
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•
to read statistics, the following is required: the
ability to understand statistical terminology and
concepts of methodologies that accompany
statistical data
statistical thinking covers understanding of
statistical data, data-related arguments and all
kinds of statistical measures for describing the
relationship between variables
Can we say that journalists are statistically
illiterate? Scarcely, reasons for publishing press
releases are well-known and were documented
in published manuals years ago.
Statisticians
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Statisticians often presume that users of
statistics, including journalists, have the ability
to understand statistics and its methodological
background that accompanies statistical data –
they are adequately statistically literate.
Should we not make the first move in
publishing comprehensible texts – instead of
our demand that the public and journalists
master substantial literacy?
We make it our duty to facilitate users to
understand statistics and to translate
professional statistical language into common
language.
Statistics goes hand in hand with
journalists
•
•
Slovenian statistical office can anticipate the
needs of journalists in view of our own
experiences in the past and publishes news
releases for special occasions when
something in the country is taking place: at
holidays, for national or international days
which are devoted to a specific group of people
or some activity, phenomena or appearance.
News releases at special occasions cover more
fields of statistics, avoiding a purely statisticalnumerical approach, and provide soft, easy to
understand, summarized information on the
selected subject.
Statistics goes hand in hand with
journalists (2)
•
news releases at special occasions in 2006:
26 releases for national and international days
like Earth Day, World Communication Day,
Internationally Family Day, National Farm
Women Day, World Day of Post, World Truism
Day, National Mountaineering Day, National Day
of Culture, International Day of Older Persons,
World Youth Day, etc.
Statistics goes hand in hand with
journalists (3)
The structure of special news releases:
• title should tell the purpose of the release
• short summary of no more than two sentences
• content in subheadings
• no methodological explanations or notes
• simplified language
• no table
• one graph maximum
• not always bilingual (Slovenian/English)
Experiences with the first two
occasional news releases
•
•
A quite lively debate was evoked in the
statistical office over whether or not the texts in
press releases were too simplified and if they
were not “professionally statistical” enough
Press-clipping reviews for the first two releases
in 2005 showed astonishingly good results,
which urged us to continue launching similar
releases for the remaining “red-letter” days and
holidays
Multi-fold results
• Even though writing news release is not an easy
task for statisticians, after publishing in the
media, statisticians are rewarded with
satisfaction and self-promotion: the author is
often exposed for further explanations or more
detailed statistics and interviews
• Usefulness of statistics is approved
• Official statistics is promoted
• Statistical office is known as being an adequately
open institution