How a sense of scale helps us to deliver the story

As families across the UK were waking up on Sunday morning, the horrific news began to trickle in from Sri Lanka – and for the rest of the Easter weekend, the death toll continued to rise.

Notifications alerted us that the death toll had risen to 138, now to 207, then 290 – with hundreds more injured. Families have been changed forever, marked by this senseless morning of violence, much of it targeting Christian worshippers.

As with the recent attacks on two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, Sunday’s events were gratuitous in their brutality – singling out religious devotees at perhaps their most vulnerable, in prayer and contemplation, seeking peace and tranquillity in holy spaces intended to offer solitude and safety.

For those of us not directly affected by the news, it can be hard to contemplate such acts of terror. Perhaps especially when we now exist within a 24-hour news cycle, and each week feels peppered by the latest tragedy – whether that’s a cyclone in Mozambique, the partial destruction of a Parisian cathedral, or a terror attack in Colombo.

As an editor, one of the challenges is to find a way to package each story so it can be immediately interesting and accessible to someone hundreds or thousands of miles away, who is not personally affected by the incident. How do we tell someone this story is worth reading?

It might seem callous, but sometimes numbers are simply the most compelling way in. It would be impossible to tell the story – in one article – of each of the some 300 lives lost on Sunday. But that number itself remains startling, and perhaps allows us to glimpse the scale of the horror even if we can never truly get to grips with each individual tragedy.

You might wonder why we race to get the latest updates on the numbers from disaster zones, but that sense of scale is important, and it’s a key way to let readers grasp the significance of the news they’re reading. An article we ran on Mozambique told us 500,000 people were affected by the cyclone – more than the population of Leeds – and that as much as 90 per cent of the city of Beira had been destroyed.

It plays out in other scenarios too. When Notre Dame was burning, the images themselves were shocking but it helped to remind people that parts of the structure were 850 years old – rendering the Gothic cathedral far older than the US, and recalling that what was burning was not just wood and lead but a slice of European history.

In Sri Lanka, until the stories of the individuals who lost their lives begin to emerge, the tolls should be enduringly powerful. A roll call of the dead and injured, the homeless or missing, could risk feeling like meaningless digits – but handled with care those compelling nuggets of evidence should harden the words we publish and help to shape a true picture of events.

Yours,

Olivia Alabaster

International editor