Our end-of-book feature Alaska Trends has seen several iterations over the years. When I first started working at the magazine, it comprised a short article about an interesting Alaska trend accompanied by two pages of data including employment numbers, a comparison of the US dollar to foreign currencies, numbers of bankruptcies, personal income, and consumer prices, among other data. The categories of data remained the same but were updated month after month. The data and article were provided by the University of Alaska Center for Economic Development. For example, a decade ago in December 2013 the article was titled “Alaska Oil Production Continues its Decline as US Oil Production Increases” by Michael Malone, who sourced data for the article from the US Energy Information Administration.

Today Alaska Trends is a two-page infographic, and the data and sources vary significantly. We select datasets considering a few factors, such as the issue’s special section, the time of year, or timely social issues—sometimes we just run with a data-rich, interesting report that fell onto one of our desks.

Our Alaska Trends this month is particularly rich as the data feels personal. The Alaska Vital Statistics 2022 Annual Report contains data that literally represents us: our births, our deaths, our marriages. The most difficult part about Alaska Trends this month was narrowing down the data. Just related to births: Do we include the Top 5 boy and girl names in the state for the last five years? What about the number of twins born? How many women opt to have a midwife during delivery versus a doctor? Insurance status? Number of women receiving epidurals?

The nature of editing is gathering information and then choosing what to print. Every publication chooses what to run and what not, which establishes that publication’s point of view and the audience it appeals to.

While we are unavoidably editors, we’re also very aware that we’re not data analysts. It’s an interesting line to walk each month as we attempt to make selections of the available data without allowing our interests to create any unintended editorial statements.

For instance, this month the vital statistics report includes information on homelessness, which is a particularly hot topic in many Alaska communities. If we place homelessness statistics immediately next to certain death statistics, our readers may read a correlation between those data that doesn’t exist.

It’s almost unavoidable to look at data and assign causes, correlations, or takeaways, especially since that’s what the data are ultimately collected for. There’s no reason to gather data just for the sake of having numbers. Data’s only value is when they can be contextualized and used to improve our lives and communities.

This is why this feature has changed over the years: publishing the same type of data month after month was informative, but it was a tiny sample of the multitude of data available to inform Alaskans about what’s going on in the state. We want our readers to have access to the reports and facts that are driving policy decisions that affect us all.