If you edit for any news feed portal, the most common errors you will encounter are not typos. They are misread statistics.
Where the problems usually hide
Writers often copy figures from press releases without checking the original source. A percentage gets rounded differently, a sample size gets dropped, or a year-on-year comparison gets confused with a month-on-month one.
These are not dramatic mistakes. They are quiet ones, and quiet mistakes travel far.
Four things to check every time
- Does the percentage match the raw numbers given in the same paragraph?
- Is the time period stated clearly — quarterly, annual, cumulative?
- Is the source primary (a published report) or secondary (another journalist)?
- Has the writer confused absolute change with relative change?
A simple process that catches most errors
Read the data sentence alone, without the surrounding text. Ask yourself: does this number make sense on its own? If you need the context to justify it, the sentence probably needs rewriting.
Then go to the original dataset. Not the press release — the actual table or methodology note. Most errors appear in the gap between those two documents.
One habit worth building early
Keep a plain text note for each article listing every statistic, its source URL, and the date accessed. This takes about three minutes per piece and has saved many editors from publishing corrections later.
Data editing is not about being suspicious of writers. It is about understanding that numbers behave differently in prose than they do in spreadsheets, and your job is to close that gap.