Magic numbers

                     A reporter on a piece about slow rescue response time in his city:

“ I’ve got a whole bunch of numbers, lots of them — just not sure which to leave in and which to take out.”

     Forget about the bunch of numbers. What’s the most interesting one — or one key one?

               “How ‘bout, the average time it takes emergency vehicles to get to the outskirts of town, where oldest residents live, 7 minutes, 11 seconds…”

Is that good, or bad? Right now it just sits in a vacuum.

“Here’s another thing: The amount of time the human brain can go without oxygen before you die is… 6 minutes.”

Woe. Hold on. Those two numbers placed together – the 7 minutes, 11 seconds it takes to reach the oldest folks, the 6 minutes the brain can keep going without oxygen, makes a whole story. It’s the lynchpin of the whole thing. (Lynchpin: (n.) 1. a pin inserted through the edge of an axletree to keep the wheel on; 2. something that holds the various elements of a complicated structure together.)

“Maybe it’s a story about numbers,” he says.

Maybe it is. What do you got?

As he talked, he picked out key raw numbers that could be used to kick off the beginning to a new section in the story:

33,705. The number of calls the Pompano Beach Fire RescueDepartment received in the past two years ….

891. How many times in the past two years a rescue truck blasted its sirens through traffic to reach The Preserves at Palm Aire, a large retirement home at the southern edge of the city …

29. The number of years since the last fire station was built in Pompano Beach … etc.

In fact, it was a story about numbers. Or, rather, the reporter’s story concept exploited the device of numbers as a storytelling tool.

Of course, the copy desk had to be alerted to his use of raw numbers heading each section, lest an eagle-eyed slot guy say, “Hey – we don’t do raw numbers….” thus wrecking the concept.

In the end, the use of the raw numbers to kick off each section served to underline the fact of the original lynchpin numbers—6 minutes for the brain to live without oxygen, 7 minutes 11 seconds to get to the city’s oldest residents.

Smart graphics people saw the storytelling potential in a timeline, beginning with 0, going on to 6 minutes, and ending at 7 minutes, 11 seconds.

The result was a beautiful front-page hit that ended up sparking a city investigation and winning the reporter a first-place state award for city beat reporting.

And it’s because he took the time to think. And to conceive. And to take a risk.   

See the page layout for the story.

Read whole story here.