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Numbers don’t speak for themselves – yet taking numbers for granted (numerism) is widespread. In fact, journalists often rely heavily on numbers precisely because they are widely considered objective. As a team of journalists and social scientists, we undertook a qualitative exploration of clauses and entire news reports that are particularly quantitatively dense. The dense clauses were often grammatically complex and assumed familiarity with sophisticated concepts. They were rarely associated with explanations of data collection methods. Meanwhile, the dense news reports were all about economy or health topics, chiefly brief updates on an ongoing event (e.g., stock market fluctuations; COVID-19 cases). We suggest that journalists can support public understanding by: * Providing more detail about research methods; * Writing shorter, clearer sentences; * Providing context behind statistics; * Being transparent about uncertainty; and * Indicating where consensus lies. We also encourage news organizations to consider structural changes like rethinking their relationship with newswires and working closely with statisticians. 

The news arguably serves to inform the quantitative reasoning (QR) of news audiences. Before one can contemplate how well the news serves this function, we first need to determine how much QR typical news stories require from readers. This paper assesses the amount of quantitative content present in a wide array of media sources, and the types of QR required for audiences to make sense of the information presented. We build a corpus of 230 US news reports across four topic areas (health, science, economy, and politics) in February 2020. After classifying reports for QR required at both the conceptual and phrase levels, we find that the news stories in our sample can largely be classified along a single dimension: The amount of quantitative information they contain. There were two main types of quantitative clauses: those reporting on magnitude and those reporting on comparisons. While economy and health reporting required significantly more QR than science or politics reporting, we could not reliably differentiate the topic area based on story-level requirements for quantitative knowledge and clause-level quantitative content. Instead, we find three reliable clusters of stories based on the amounts and types of quantitative information in the news stories.