A Buyer's Market For Trend Stories

By Dick Weiss
April 8, 2008

In a troubled economy, you’ll find a buyer’s market for trend stories – the kind that crunch numbers to reveal winners and losers and sometimes victims and villains. Trend stories typically stand on three legs – numbers, the analysis of experts and the experiences of those affected. In the following stories from the Chicago Tribune, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and The Washington Post, you’ll see how four reporters applied those principles while also adding a few interesting twists.

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3 Why Egg Prices Are Cracking Budgets
Mike Hughlett of the Chicago Tribune
Eggs are at $2 a dozen, making breakfast at home and meals out a lot more expensive. Hughlett set out to find out why. While he comes up with many answers you might expect – feed prices are higher -- he also reveals other angles that suggest prices may remain high well beyond the current economic cycle. Notice how Hughlett deftly juggles the numbers while also providing some vivid descriptions of egg laying operations.

2 Staying In School Just To Stay Insured
Bill Schackner of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Why’s that community college student missing so many classes and doing poorly on his exams? Well, it might be that he’s enrolled just to stay insured. Schackner found students in his region who are helping out their parents by staying in school when they would rather be doing something else. That way they can remain on a parent’s health plan. Numbers from the government concerning students and families facing this dilemma were hard to come by, but Schackner did what he could by gathering data and estimates from each school. He also collected a series of poignant accounts from administrators.  They sometimes face the difficult choice of dismissing students who will lose their health insurance as a result.

1The Profit In Decay
Debbie Cenziper and Sarah Cohen of The Washington Post
Sometimes you’ll find victims even when an economic trend points up. That’s what happened in Washington where the market for condos got so hot that landlords started looking for ways to evict their tenants. An empty building is far cheaper to convert to a condo than one that is occupied. That’s because tenants have a say in the conversion and are entitled to relocation costs. Cenziper and Cohen’s intensive research into the numbers found that an increasing number of vacant buildings were going condo. And when they looked behind the numbers they found some owners who were shutting off the utilities and otherwise making their buildings miserable and uninhabitable so tenants would just pick up and leave. Breathtaking stuff.

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Copyright © 2008 Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism