All Economy, All the Time

By Tim McGuire
March 11, 2008 05:40 PM

Polls are telling us the economy is more important than Iraq. And business journalists told businessjournalism.org in late 2007 that economic issues were going to be crucial this year.

Does your news report reflect this?

All aspects of the economy should be appearing more on your front pages, your business covers and on your Web site. You have to examine whether your coverage of the economy is compelling, insightful and more helpful than that of your competitors.

I recently tracked down a fun Web site (Nieman Watchdog), which poses the questions media should be asking. As I perused that site, I found a particularly interesting guide for media covering the tepid economy. I love guides. And I love to add my two cents. So let's take a stab at my guide, the McGuire's guide to covering Economy 2008.

Let's start where every news conversation in the country starts today: at the resource question. I contend the guiding premise must be the economy is a master narrative. It should be the overriding story--the refracted glass through which you look at all your local coverage. If the story takes that center stage, then the story encompasses your newsroom and demands resources beyond the business page. The best business editors need to lead that coverage, design it and cheerlead for it, but if you try to cover it alone with just business staff, you are not going to do right by readers.

Of equal importance are expertise and cohesiveness. The days of generalists understanding the interactions and interconnections of our modern economy are probably over. Readers demand that we know what we are talking about. They also require that we present information in a consistent, comprehensive package. Cohesiveness of coverage should guide decision making.

The next step is to make sure your economic coverage is twenty-first-century-based and not 1970's oriented. The recent economic stimulus package provides a great example. Economic stimulus packages were big when America manufactured its own goods. Government provided taxpayers with an extra six or seven hundred bucks to buy a new TV, dishwasher or stove. That purchase benefited the local merchant, the truckers and wholesalers who delivered the goods and the manufacturer in some Michigan or Ohio town. Globalization has changed all that, but did your coverage change? I saw precious little analysis of the stimulus package that put it in a 2008 reality where goods are manufactured in Mexico or China.

The mortgage crisis is another example of how this possible recession looks different than those of the past. It also illustrates how readers are crucial players in the story and not just observers. For starters, we should be calling it a mortgage crisis and not the "sub-prime" crisis. I can almost hear the condescension in that term "sub-prime." This story is bigger than the defaults that are hitting a lot of homeowners. Most Americans have a huge part of their net worth tied up in their home. I am not seeing the story covered that way. Our readers have a huge stake in that foreclosure down the block and in the difficulty in getting home equity loans. Readers are frightened. Great journalism will address those fears head-on.

Certainly these stories are being covered, but I am concerned that they are not being covered with the intensity and human drama inherent in them. These stories have "compelling" written all over them and human, insightful, "value-added coverage" can make newspapers important again.

In all our coverage of the economy we have to make connections for the reader. The gasoline price story is an example. Major family decisions are being made because of the rising cost of gas. Readers are scrambling, and at the same time, they are perplexed about why it's happening.

It seems as if we have been talking about "news you can use" stories since I entered the news business in the early 1970's. If there was ever a time for that journalistic orientation, it is now. An entire column on your business cover of tips, insights and guidance for spending money, saving it and investing it would not be overdoing the helpful approach. We should try to knit together the economic developments of the day into a cohesive whole that explains what's happening with the economy rather than bombarding readers with disconnected parts which only serve to confuse.

Recently there's been some media talk about stagflation. Some of us old folks have been through stagflation. Most of our audience hasn't. Journalism has the unique ability to teach and guide without being pedantic. The treacherous economic issues we face in the next several months offer journalists the opportunity to metaphorically take the reader by the hand and help them through this difficult time. If newspapers make compelling coverage of the economy the top local news priority, there is a great chance to establish a new bond with our readers based on fulfilling a crucial need.

Tim McGuire is the Frank Russell Chair for the business of journalism at Arizona State University and the former editor and senior vice president of the Minneapolis Star Tribune. Read his blog here.

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