Media Weekly - Nice figure

So it turns out Douglas Adams was lying. The answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything isn’t quite 42. It’s actually 41.8. That’s the figure, in degrees centigrade, you need your knife to be at to perfectly spread cold butter on your toast. Useful to know.

Coming across that delightfully exact number in among my daily trawl of the major picture stories on the Daily Mail website got me thinking about how many news stories lead with or hinge-on that all important number. I in no way suggest this as rocket science. For starters, sport and the way it is reported is unsurprisingly a pretty heavily numbers led game. This week’s stories about England flying home from Euro 2012 after losing to the Italians would have been a little odd without at least a small reference to the scoreline, even if the real story was Pirlo’s audacious penalty.

That said the past 7 days provide plenty of evidence that a good number really does make for a good story and a good media debate. For example over the last few days we’ve had headlines about 54,000 lightning bolts hitting the Midlands and Kate Middleton spending £35,000 on dresses in a year, too much or too little depending on which paper you read. Big numbers are designed to shock us, but small ones can too.

Numbers give you countdowns to milestones, and the chance to mutter immortal phrases like  “River boat to rings, release the rings now”. Even not knowing the numbers can be news, as Chloe Smith and the Premier of Queensland both ably demonstrated this week.

Getting the right number into a story or a pitch is an essential skill for both journalists and PRs wanting to illustrate or pitch a story, providing context and allowing for comparisons to be drawn. But if you haven’t got numbers for your story, you can always just try to make the most of your figure.

Tweet of the week: @hylandian David Beckham, spotted minutes ago outside Stuart Pearce's house: pic.twitter.com/HFmruFD3