Stats -- Get To The Point

A good nut graf not only supports and details the lede, but supports and details what makes the lede most newsworthy.

If you're covering a football game, it's not that a game was played and that the game was part of a regular-season schedule and so forth; it's who won or lost, and why.

In the case of the stats story, what made it most newsworthy wasn't that a survey was taken; it's what the survey found. I think this two-graf nut graf sequence -- the type of which was repeated by quite a few of you on this exercise -- focused on the wrong thing:

A recent U.S. Census Bureau survey on American computer and internet use shows ownership and usage in households has dramatically increased since the early 1980s.

Conducted in October for the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the survey came from a series of questionnaire supplements conducted as part of the Current Population Survey (CPS). The CPS is a survey of about 50,000 households, is conducted each month by the U.S. Census Bureau, and has come to be used as a tool to measure many economic, demographic, and social conditions of the U.S. population.

Statistics from the survey include the age, sex, race, and education of the householder; the type, size, income, and number of children in the household; and the household’s region.

In 1984, 8.2 percent of U.S. households reported to the Census Bureau that they owned a home computer. By 1997, it increased to 36.6 percent. Currently, 61.8 percent of 113.1 million American households have one or more computers, shows the survey’s findings.

Now, that last graf does look like a nut graf to me: it directly details the study's findings. So, why not get rid of the two existing nut grafs and make that fourth graf your nut, like this:

A recent U.S. Census Bureau survey on American computer and internet use shows ownership and usage in households has dramatically increased since the early 1980s.

In 1984, 8.2 percent of U.S. households reported to the Census Bureau that they owned a home computer. By 1997, it increased to 36.6 percent. Currently, 61.8 percent of 113.1 million American households have one or more computers, shows the survey’s findings.

Then you could take the two excluded grafs and move them to the end of the story as background, or eliminate 'em altogether.

I think the confusion may have stemmed from the fact that the background info was offered to you first in the press release. All because something is offered to you first doesn't mean that you should recite it in the order it was presented.

Just as if you were covering a city council meeting, you need to evaluate a press release and decide what is most important to emphasize, what is second most important, and what is not at all important, and order the information you present in that order.