A story published by Citizen Digital on July 1, 2025, bore the headline: ‘Gov’t alarmed after 50,000 qualified students fail to apply for university placement.’
Cross-checking with other media houses, the figure quoted appeared much less. The Nation newspaper in a related story published on July 2, 2025, titled, ‘Over 42,000 KCSE qualifiers didn’t apply for varsity placement,’ reported that 201,695 out of 244,563 who attained grade C+ and above applied to join university.
After subtracting 201,695 from 244,563, it gives 42,868 as the number of candidates who qualified for university, but didn’t apply.
The difference between 50,000 as reported by Citizen Digital, and 42,868 as reported by Nation, is 7,132. This is quite significant in terms of human population.
When reporting, journalists must prioritise accuracy as any discrepancy could send the wrong message to different audiences.
Giving the correct facts and figures is essential news reporting, and journalists should consider every figure as having an implication, such as in financing or project planning.
Audiences interpret information differently, and rounding off 42,868 to 50,000 may seem to an editor or journalist acceptable or comprehensible to the audience, but to a planner or data analyst, figure ’40’ and figure ’50’ could present different things, especially in application of data accuracy for accountability.
In another article titled, ‘Nairobi County hits record Ksh13.8B in own revenue,’ published on July 1, Citizen Digital reported that: “Nairobi City County has recorded its highest revenue collection since the onset of devolution, reaching KSh13.7 billion for the 2024/2025 financial year.”
The figure indicated in the headline differs with the one in the intro by Sh100 million. The second para reads: “This marks a notable increase from last year’s KSh12.8 billion—an additional KSh1 billion—highlighting the success of ongoing reforms and intensified revenue collection efforts.”
Now, when Sh12.8bn is subtracted from Sh13.7bn, the remainder is Sh900 million. The figure may sound too close to a billion, but to an economist the gap of Sh100 million is quite significant and could prompt a curious journalist to ask the Nairobi City County officials, what might have prevented the figure from reaching one billion.
In yet another story published in the Nation business segment on July 3, 2025, the writer used technical words in the headline to explain a step taken by the government to use a Global Positioning System (GPS) technology as corruption deterrent measure during state project tendering process.
Titled, ‘Tender papers get geographic coordinates in ghost projects purge,’ the story’s headline would have been made simpler to understand for the lay reader.
The use of the words ‘purge’ and ‘geographic coordinates’ made the headline complex. Intro: “Counties and national government agencies will now have to indicate geographic coordinates of projects in tender documents, in new changes aimed at curbing ghost projects that have consumed billions of shillings.”
Then paragraph two: “As part of new requirements under the government procurement system (e-GPS), purchasing entities are now required to indicate the physical location of projects through geographic coordinates.”
The editor could have written an easier headline that fitted the story context, and considered pushing “geographic coordinates” and “purge” further into the rest of the content, where more space is available to elaborate and explain about the use of geographic coordinates, which are technical words.
The point is, both editor and journalist have a collective duty to ensure stories communicate in the clearest way to the least informed reader or audience.
