Wednesday February 08, 2012

CCJ Books

The Elements of Journalism: What Newspeople Should Know and the Public Should Expect

Completely updated and revised
"The most important book on the relationship of journalism and democracy published in the last fifty years." – Roy Peter Clark, The Poynter Institute
We Interrupt This Newscast: How to Improve Local News and Win Ratings, Too

Just Released
A landmark study on what people watch and why. The most exhaustive study ever of local TV news -- what helps ratings, what drives viewers away, and what editorial approaches and story-telling techniques most influence viewership.

Meaning of Mean

Robert Niles, Editor - Online Journalism Review, July 29, 2006

This is one of the more common statistics you will see. And it's easy to compute. All you have to do is add up all the values in a set of data and then divide that sum by the number of values in the dataset. Here's an example:

Let's say you are writing about the World Wide Widget Co. and the salaries of its nine employees.

The CEO makes $100,000 per year,
Two managers make $50,000 per year,
Four factory workers make $15,000 each, and
Two trainees make $9,000 per year.

So you add $100,000 + $50,000 + $50,000 + $15,000 + $15,000 + $15,000 + $15,000 + $9,000 + $9,000 (all the values in the set of data), which gives you $278,000. Then divide that total by 9 (the number of values in the set of data).

That gives you the mean, which is $30,889.

Not a bad average salary. But be careful when using this number. After all, only three of the nine workers at WWW Co. make that much money. And the other six workers don't even make half the average salary.

So what statistic should you use when you want to give some idea of what the average worker at WWW Co. is earning? It's time to learn about the median.