Making Sense of Hard Times

By Dick Weiss
October 8, 2008

In the current economic environment, business journalists must step up and help us make sense of the world. The New York Times did just that with an interactive online piece that does a splendid job of explaining how we came to this state of affairs. We can learn valuable lessons from this treatment about how to write for the Web and how to boil matters down to their essence. But we also can learn from smaller papers like the St. Petersburg Times and The Palm Beach Post. Their reporters examined key statistics in housing, and in, of all things, baseball and then put the numbers in perspective.

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3 Hope for housing: Inventory shrinks
Jeff Ostrowski of The Palm Beach Post
Stories about the housing market tend to strike a chord with readers because, well, they hit us where we live. Everyone seems to be wondering when the market will improve. Ostrowski looked at housing inventory statistics for the Palm Beach region. He found that, while still high, the number of homes for sale had dropped significantly enough to signal that the market might have started to turn around. Still, he's careful to balance the story with caveats. This is no time for irrational exuberance.

2Do new parks bring wins?
Stephen Nohlgren and Aaron Sharockman of the St. Petersburg Times
Owners of major league baseball clubs often argue they need spanking new stadiums to increase revenues. They contend that new facilities will boost their payrolls so that they can field winning teams. Nohlgren and Sharockman at the St. Petersburg Times put that argument to the test by reviewing the win-loss records over the last decade of teams with new ballparks. They found that reality ain't necessarily the way owners wish it to be so. This piece is stuffed with facts and figures, but is no less readable as a result.

1How a market crisis unfolded
R.M. Schneiderman, Philip Caulfield, Celina Fang, Elisabeth Goodridge, Vikas Bajaj of The New York Times
Here's a nifty, interactive timeline that offers interesting sidebars and compelling photos as well. If you want a quick guide to how we got into the economic mess we're in, there's none better for our online age.

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