Consumer confidence is down again in October

Consumer confidence fell to 47.7 percent in October, from 53.2 the previous month; well off from Wall Street’s forecast of 54 percent.

Forbes and Bloomberg News both had this story highlighted on the main page of their websites Tuesday afternoon, and both publications attributed the drop to the rise of unemployment.

Forbes had this news on the home page of it’s website with related stories about the housing market and people staying in the work force longer linked beneath it.

Carl Gutierrez of Forbes focused on the unemployment rate as the driver of the low confidence rating, as well as mentioned the dollar’s recent weakness.

The writers at Bloomberg also focused on unemployment but also put a lot of focus on retail and home sales.

Bloomberg went into far more detail and analyzed the Conference Board’s consumer confidence index in more depth than the Forbes article did, however, it is also true that the Forbes article was up on their website two hours before the Bloomberg article.

This raises the question of timeliness. Was it better for Bloomberg to put two reporters on the story and spend more time gathering information, or should they have put the story out as fast as they can.

With this story, Bloomberg did the right thing. A drop in consumer confidence is not breaking headline news, but when analyzed and put into a deeper context, it becomes a compelling piece readers will want to tune into.