As usual I began my day by reading the local newspaper, The Winston-Salem Journal.  I think the Journal compares well with other small-city newspapers and I actually enjoy being able to read the entire paper over a cup (or six) of coffee.  But as I read the business section today I became confused.  My problem began with an AP story that had the headline "Looking Jollier" (ed. note: they use a different headline for the online version of the story) and details the rising consumer confidence index.  As part of the story they have this sentence:

Meanwhile, the Commerce Department said that sales of new single-family homes rose by 13 percent last month, the biggest one-month gain in more than 12 years.

Great news that new home sales are increasing right?  Well, yesterday there was another AP story on the front page of the business section with the headline "Sales of Existing Houses Go Down."  "Okay," I tell myself, "so sales of new homes are soaring while sales of existing homes are tanking.  But wasn’t there something else in yesterday’s article about future building?"  So I pulled up the old article and found this:

The weakness in existing home sales followed an earlier report that construction of new homes and apartments fell by 5.6 percent in October, the biggest setback in seven months.  Applications for new building permits, a good sign of future activity, fell by 6.7 percent, the biggest decline in six years.

Hmmm.  What does it all mean.  To make it even more interesting, or confusing depending on how you look at it, there’s another item in today’s paper that says that the sales of existing homes in the local region rose two percent in October, which means that the local market did better than the nationwide market. 

So what am I to think?  Obviously there’s a mixed economic picture, but since I’m not an economist I’m not sure exactly what it all means.  I could hope for the newspaper to provide me some guidance, but they are only spitting out data, not providing context or guidance.  In all fairness to the paper this is simply one story of many that they can cover, and Lord knows they’re stretched thin by their current business problems.  But maybe they have their current business problems because of stories like these.

It has become abundantly clear to anyone who hasn’t lived in a cave the past 10 years that information (news) is a commodity.  Anyone with a computer and an internet connection can spew data to the world, but what takes time and talent is providing background, a sense of scope and most importantly perspective.  Is it because most people equate perspective with opinion that the folks in the news business shy away from injecting their own thoughts or analysis into stories?  If so I think that’s a flawed assumption that leads to a product of limited or no value.

Let’s be clear: straight opinion belongs on the op-ed page.  But editors and reporters can create value by giving us the news and then providing some perspective without crossing the line into opinion.  Some newspaper pieces identified with the tag "Analysis" that we see in the paper on an infrequent basis are a good start, but they are too few and far between.  What we need is for each story to be "framed."

Most stories in most papers are simply regurgitations of what happened, when it happened and to whom it happened.  Rarely do newspapers frame the story for us, give us an idea where it fits in the larger picture.  It’s this framing, this perspective, that would give a story depth and value.

For an example look at the two stories I highlighted.  Instead of simply reciting this economic data give me an overview of the data and then put it in perspective and make it relevant to my life.  For instance, does it mean that while the national housing picture is indicative of a slowdown the local housing market is actually on the rise?  Tell me why that is.  Tell me that it’s probably because the local economy has been hammered for the last five years while the rest of the country has been on a great economic ride.  Tell me if we’ll see more construction jobs here, if local housing inventory is shrinking, if the value of my house is probably going to continue to rise. 

In short tell me what it means, because if you don’t I probably won’t continue to subscribe and I know for damn sure that the kids coming of age now will have no time for you.  But just like me today’s young adults need someone to help them understand what all this information means, and if you could tell them they would pay for it.

As things stand I’m still confused.