Summer jobsCorrected
A draft used $4.098 as the Central Atlantic regular-gasoline average. The EIA figure for that week was about $3.93. Corrected, along with the gas-cost and effective-wage numbers that followed from it.
I’m a high school student, not a newsroom. That means the sourcing rules have to be stricter, not looser, because nobody is checking my work before it goes up. This page says what those rules are and lists what I have gotten wrong.
Every number comes from a primary source where one exists. In practice that means the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Federal Reserve, the Energy Information Administration, the Census Bureau, Montgomery Planning, and MCPS publications including the capital improvements program. Each article ends with a data line naming its sources, and where a figure is contested between sources I name the specific series I used, because two credible sources can report different numbers for the same month and quietly picking one is how errors survive.
Some findings here are not published anywhere. The school-by-school MCPS capacity breakdown is arithmetic I did myself from Appendix E of the capital improvements program: enrollment minus listed capacity, per school, summed separately for schools over and under. Where that happens, the article says so explicitly and describes the method, and the underlying data is published as an open dataset so anyone can reproduce or contradict it. An original calculation that nobody can check is not evidence.
I remove it, and I say that I removed it. An unverifiable claim that supports my argument is more dangerous than one that undercuts it, because I am less likely to look hard at it, and leaving a shaky number in because it makes the piece stronger is the failure mode I am most trying to avoid.
If something here is wrong, email me. I will fix the article and add the change to the log below rather than editing quietly. I would rather be corrected than be wrong, and a visible correction log is the only thing that makes that claim mean anything.
A draft used $4.098 as the Central Atlantic regular-gasoline average. The EIA figure for that week was about $3.93. Corrected, along with the gas-cost and effective-wage numbers that followed from it.
A draft claimed BLS later revised February producer prices from 0.7% to 0.5%. I could not confirm that revision in the BLS releases, so the claim was removed; the article reports the 0.7% figure as published.
A draft cited an 18% teacher vacancy rate at Walter Johnson. I could not find credible evidence for it and removed the claim. The affordability point it supported is now carried by the starting MCPS salary and the county median rent, both sourced.
A draft stated the county’s Gini coefficient rose from 0.42 to 0.46. I could not confirm a consistent primary source and time period, so the claim was cut, with a note in the article explaining the removal.
An earlier version used Brent crude at roughly $94 on March 9, which understated conditions at the March 17–18 FOMC meeting. Corrected to $108 on March 17 and $118 on March 18, from the EIA daily Europe Brent Spot Price FOB series.
Two EIA shut-in figures for April appeared without explanation. They are not contradictory: 9.1 million barrels per day was the forecast in the April outlook, and 10.5 million was the later estimate once April had ended. The article now distinguishes the two.
An earlier version gave the average credit-card rate as “around 21%,” which covers all accounts. Because the passage discusses someone carrying a balance, it now uses 22.15%, the rate on accounts actually assessed interest, from the Federal Reserve’s July 8 release.
“Restaurant meals” replaced with “eating out” to match the BLS category actually cited, food away from home.