You ask how a reporter finds stories in numbers. It is one of the oldest and most reliable skills in the trade, and it has nothing to do with being a mathematician. It is about curiosity, and about knowing that behind every official figure there is a human story waiting to be told.
Numbers are everywhere, sitting in plain sight, and most of them are public if you know where to look. Company annual reports. Council minutes and budgets. The court lists posted each morning. Electoral rolls. The Government Gazette. Coroners' findings. The figures published by the Australian Bureau of Statistics. Hansard, the written record of what is said in parliament. None of it is secret. Most of it is free. And hardly anyone in the newsroom bothers to read it, which is precisely why it is full of stories nobody else has.
The trick is to make the figure human. A column of statistics means nothing to a reader until you turn it into a person, a place or a change. "Burglaries in the shire rose by a third last year" is a fact. It becomes a story when you walk down the affected street and knock on doors. So read the numbers to find the story, then go out and report it the ordinary way, with your feet and your notebook.
Three habits will keep you honest. First, always go back to the original source. Do not trust a number quoted in a press release or another paper; find where it first came from and check it yourself. Second, ask what the number leaves out. A "record" figure may simply reflect a bigger population, and a percentage means little until you know the raw count behind it. Third, beware of confusing two things that happen at the same time with one thing causing the other. Two figures that rise together are not proof that one caused the other, and saying so is a classic beginner's blunder.
Above all, be sceptical. Anyone can wave a statistic about to make a case, and your job is to ask where it came from, who gathered it, and what they wanted you to believe. Test the number as hard as you would test a talkative witness. Do that, and a quiet page of figures will hand you stories your rivals walked straight past.