{
  "id": "1998-december-stats-from-the-road",
  "slug": "1998-december-stats-from-the-road",
  "url": "https://dwillis.github.io/uplink/article/1998-december-stats-from-the-road.html",
  "year": 1998,
  "month": "December",
  "monthNum": 12,
  "headline": "STATS FROM THE ROAD",
  "kicker": "",
  "author_name": "Sarah Cohen",
  "author_title": "Data Journalist",
  "affiliation": "NICAR",
  "summary": "Journalists should use inflation-adjusted figures when comparing dollar amounts across years, and the author recommends George Landau's NewsEngin tool as the most accurate and user-friendly calculator available, while cautioning against outdated tools that lack transparent methodology.",
  "keywords": [
    "inflation",
    "calculators",
    "journalism"
  ],
  "topics": [
    "Investigative Methods",
    "Data & Databases",
    "Journalism & Newsroom"
  ],
  "technologies": [
    "Internet",
    "World Wide Web"
  ],
  "full_text": "Almost every comparison using dollars over a number of years should be adjusted for inflation. It's simply not fair to talk about salary or budget increases since the 1970s without building in inflation.\n\nNot enough reporters do this, and that's a shame. It's also now inexcusable. The data is sitting on the Web, as are tools that make the simple calculation for you.\n\nA recent question from an IRE member prompted me to test a variety of these inflation-adjustment (or cost-of-living) calculators on the Web. I was looking for results consistent with my own calculations, documentation that let me verify how they'd come to an answer, and a simple interface that clearly guided me to enter data for the answer I expected.\n\nNot many of the tools met my challenge.\n\nAnd the winner is\n\nOnly George Landau's NewsEngin tool passed in all categories: accuracy, documentation and ease of use. Landau, a longtime IRE member, also confirms the date of the last update, letting you know his data is up-to-the-minute accurate. The instructions of some calculators were so indecipherable that you could easily make a mistake filling them out. Others introduced rounding errors or slightly erroneous data into their calculations.\n\nAny site that doesn't keep its data up to date and doesn't provide details on how it performs its calculations ought to be eliminated from your list of bookmarks.\n\nThe rounding error isn't very worrisome. In fact, if rounding makes such a big difference in an answer, there's a good reason to report the answers at a general level. There's no reason to imply a false sense of precision when doing work based on indexes with bigger flaws than a calculation would introduce.\n\nBut any site that doesn't keep its data up to date and doesn't provide details on how it performs its calculations ought to be eliminated from your list of bookmarks. It's just not worth the effort to worry that you've filled it out incorrectly, that it's using the correct formula, or that the data is out of date.\n\nHow the calculators calculate\n\nGenerally, you type in a value like a salary. You tell the inflation adjuster what year the salary applies to and in what year you want it expressed. Then you receive an inflation-adjusted figure.\n\nAlmost all of the calculators assume you want to inflate previous year dollars. So if you type in $25,000, 1975 and 1997, you'll get what a salary of $25,000 in 1975 would be today, after inflation.\n\nThat's usually how we do it, even though the instructions on official Web sites imply you ought to use some other base year. The reason is that readers, viewers and listeners can picture what a dollar is worth today. Few accurately remember what it was worth a long time ago.\n\nOn your own\n\nInstead of depending on someone else, most reporters who deal with dollar values like budgets, salaries or home values ought to learn how to compute inflation-adjusted figures themselves.\n\nThen you can leave the Web tools where they belong - as a check on your own work. It's not hard. I promise. Here's the formula:\n\n(CPI Then) Value then = Old dollars inflated to compare in new dollars.\n\nTo get the CPI, just visit the BLS home page at http://www.bls.gov. Then choose \"Data,\" and \"Most requested series.\" Almost everyone uses the CPI-U, or the national CPI for all urban consumers, as their deflator. It doesn't matter which base period you use; they all use the same underlying data.\n\nSarah Cohen can be reached by e-mail at sarah@nicar.org",
  "provenance": {
    "extracted_by": "anthropic/claude-sonnet-4-6",
    "extracted_at": "2026-07-05",
    "verified": true
  },
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}