Good news, bad news about the economy

For publication in The Kamloops Daily News on Saturday, Feb. 14, 2009

My investment adviser seemed down in the dumps.

We were having coffee earlier this week, talking, of course, about the economy. This is not a good time for portfolio managers. When people start losing money, they look for someone to blame, and the first one they point a finger at is the fellow who is supposed to be getting them 10 per cent a year, not losses of 20, 30 or more.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “It’s not your fault anymore. It’s mine.”

He brightened at this piece of news. “You’re right,” he said. “It’s the media’s fault this week.”

Of late, the media have become the bad guys in this deepening recession. If only we’d stop printing bad news, things would be so much better.

A realtor friend sent me along a piece written by an American broker who is convinced of that. “It’s media hype,” he wrote of the recession. “No, it’s worse than media hype. It’s a vast media distortion, used to sensationalize and sell the news.”

He’s not alone. We ran a story recently that quoted Glen Hodgson, chief economist at the Conference Board of Canada, as saying, “If (the media) keep saying the sky is falling, well, people think the sky is falling.”

But the story also quoted university marketing professor David Soberman: “If you are a retired person who just had 50 per cent of your RRSP wiped out, or you are in Oshawa now where factories are closing because of problems in the auto sector, how can you say those people are overreacting?”

Ah, and that would seem to get to the nub of the matter when it comes to local media and how we handle news of the economy — Kamloops is not Oshawa.

True, retirees in Kamloops are getting hammered as hard as anyone else, and a worker laid off from Thompson Veneer Products is just as unemployed as the auto worker in Oshawa.

Still, context is important. Let’s break this down into manageable pieces. Most of us can probably agree that the U.S., global and Canadian economies are in recession, and that things will get worse before they get better.

Not everyone can agree, however, on how hard Kamloops is being hit. While it’s clear our economy here at home has faltered, it’s also pretty clear that B.C. and Kamloops are better off than the rest of the country.

Indeed, an argument might be made that our Kamloops economy is not currently in recession, though bad news is easy to find.

Unemployment has climbed to seven per cent, copper prices are at a three-year low, house construction has slowed, there have been several hundred layoffs in mining, manufacturing, transportation and forestry, tourism is going flat, major consumer purchases are off, and so on. 

While we don’t make that stuff up, the flash point for criticism of local media goes back to context. Some feel we generalize, that we lump Kamloops in with the gloomy outlook elsewhere and provide a false picture that keeps everybody in a funk.

I’d argue that we aren’t doing nearly as bad a job as our critics think. We print the bad news, yes, but I challenge the perception of the retailer who called me the other day to declare that “you guys print nothing but negative news!” 

For example, we’ve reported any number of times the optimism in the local housing industry, the tourism industry, the auto industry and the air industry. We’ve analyzed Kamloops’ prospects for weathering the storm and written in some depth about that.

Last week, the lead story on our front page was about Nexterra receiving $3 million in government funding to expand operations and create a bunch of new jobs. Good news is news, now more than ever.

This past Wednesday night this newspaper sponsored, and reported on, a CHBA dinner at which David Trawin of the City projected construction in 2009 will be average. Average is a long way from being in the tank.

Business success stories? We chronicle them constantly, especially in our Enterprise section and in our full-colour glossy magazine Kamloops Business.

Community success stories? Always. Tell us your story or your cause and we’ll tell readers about it, not to mention the hundreds — literally — of community causes we support with corporate donations and resources, including major projects like Raise A Reader, Canspell, the Christmas Cheer Fund and The Daily News Boogie.

Since when, by the way, did “selling newspapers” become a bad thing? The fact people are willing to pay for our product means it has value to them, which means it has value to our advertising clients as well.

Our bottom line is at stake, too. I and every other media employee in Kamloops wants our local economy to be healthy because our community, our employers, and our jobs depend on it.

Life would be easier for local media if we all paid for a ticket on the “We’re OK” bandwagon with sugarcoated news coverage. But that’s following, not leading, and a state of denial about this economy is as bad as a state of panic.

This is a complicated thing. The media haven’t created the world recession any more than we can take credit for the previous seven years of boom times when everybody was making good money and buying up a storm.

There’s equally no doubt in my mind that the media can affect the depth and breadth of the recession, especially in our home towns, just as our politicians, business leaders and every other community stakeholder can. We’re in it together.

And I certainly concede that, while we in the media are working hard at doing a good job for the community, there’s lots of room for improvement. It’s been a work in progress. Our failure is not that we’re too focused on covering the economy, but that we haven’t drilled deeply enough.  

We need to take a more analytical and more targeted approach to coverage. We need to avoid generalizations, to expose the entrails of this economy and examine key indicators in a more comprehensive way, a thorough SWOT analysis.

This is a double-edged sword, of course — while I know we’ll find many bright spots, there’s no guarantee it will all be “positive” news — but this is a situation in which facts are friendly. That’s why we demanded that the mayor set up a task force on the economy, and that’s why we demanded he open up the meetings.

As the Bank of Canada governor said the other day after being lambasted for sounding too optimistic, it isn’t about spin, it’s about information. When people have good information, they can make good decisions. The very best thing local media can do to help our community is to get better at providing good, accurate, balanced, thoughtful information and analysis.

If we can do that, the community will be the better for it, and there will be less cause to criticize the job we’re doing.