Do April's lead articles obey Benford's Law? And how does the running total look?

This is the results of the third month of monitoring news articles for which numbers they contain.

I missed a couple more days in April, I blame Easter, and I will catch these up at the end of the year.

In the 27 days I did manage to capture, 232 numbers were used in the leading news articles on bbc.co.uk (~ 8 to 9 per day).  This is slightly less than the 9-10 in March and a lot less than the 15 per day from February.

9 is the number closest to its expected value.  2 is over-represented, 8 is under-represented. If you add together the sum of all the values of (observed-expected)squared, all divided by the expected, the calculated test statistic is 5.7.

The critical chi squared value for 9 items with only one line is ~ 15.507

The test statistic smaller than the critical value therefore the difference is not significant. This data does not disobey Benford's Law.

If you look at the rolling total of February to the end of April, the numbers are starting to add up.  Since the start of February, there have been 941 digits in headline news articles.

5 is the number closest to its expected value.  1 remains over-represented, while 6 is under-represented. If you add together the sum of all the values of (observed-expected)squared, all divided by the expected, the calculated test statistic is 2.29.

The critical chi squared value for 9 items with only one line is ~ 15.507

The test statistic smaller than the critical value therefore the difference is not significant. This data does not disobey Benford's Law.

Interestingly, as more numbers from articles have been added the calculated test statistic has reduced (February = 8.6, February + March = 3.49, February + March + April = 2.29).  This is what you would expect to see if the numbers in the articles fulfill Benford's law.