Covering the Economy: David Cay Johnston

One of the best journalists we have at making numbers real. Here's some of what he thinks:

THE POWER OF ONE, which means reducing everything to $1 or to percent. Everyone, everyone gets 22-cents on the dollar; but hardly anyone grasps that $3.33 billion is 22 percent of $15.15 billion.

Million, billion, trillion -- they are all just meaningless to most people.... The journalist's job is to translate complex numbers into simple English and concepts easily grasped. Best to turn things into so many cents out of each dollar, or into dollars per hour or week or, if the numbers are small enough, per year. Then most people get it...

Make sure someone asks about the benefits and detriments of complex charts...