It is really easy for Journalist to overuse numbers, to the point of making a reader feel lost.
Not to say that numbers are not helpful, for instance they can display dates, times, percentages, amounts, and identification.
It is up to the journalist to decide whether it is truly important to use numbers over words. If the numbers are not tactically helpful than they probably should not be used.
It is hard to remember numbers, and a reader can easily get lost in numbers. It sometimes helpful to say, "enough people to fill and entire football field", a description instead of a 50,000 people.
Context is necessary as well, for instance 5 million dollars is a lot for a person to have, but that number would seem extremely small if we were talking about the national budget.
Dates are simple and easy, however if you say in 2003 such and such happened, you may want to say seven years ago because it has a bigger impact.
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