Since I’ve been busy pontificating about how people should write, why stop with yesterday’s post? If there’s one thing that makes me crazy about tech journalism right now its the way many of the writers throw around “statistics”.

I’ll admit that things have evolved where most journalists are no longer talking about how many “hits” a website gets. But we’re still not where we should be. What I’d really love to see when journalists are writing about websites are:

• unique users by time period (monthly is fine)
• page views by time period (less important but interesting too)
• engagement, how many minutes people are spending on the site per visit
• and most importantly… where these numbers are coming from… are they self-reported? And if they are self-reported (which I believe they often are), how about cross-checking them with some of the auditing services and pointing out any glaring inconsistencies

There are plenty of other numbers that would be interesting but I’d just be interested in the basics. Right now it feels like journalists throw out numbers without context. In addition to making clear the source of the numbers, having a comparison point with similarly sourced numbers for context would be the cherry on top.

I realize this is a bunch of work for someone whipping out a quick blog post, but until there’s more context around the numbers, the statistics I read in most (but not all) tech articles are useless.

Apologies in advance to the few tech writers who are already providing this level of information in their reports.