Keeping it real in storm of bad economic reports

In reporting on the Great Recession of 2009, Chicken Little and Pollyanna Whittier are more than the stuff of children's fairy tales. They are relevant, thought-provoking allegories.

Chicken Little you probably know well as the paranoid young chick who mistakes an acorn dropping on her head for imminent celestial disaster and stirs up the entire barnyard with cries of "The sky is falling!" Pollyanna Whittier you may best remember as the fictional teenager who changed a down-and-out town with her relentless cheerfulness and gave our language the term for someone with unbridled optimism in the face of even the worst calamity, Pollyanna.

The newspaper likely is always trying to find the right balance between the two extremes of excessive alarm and unrealistic cheer, but in troubled times like these, finding that elusive point is even more important.

Unfortunately, it is all too easy right now for us to present a daily litany of bad economic news. It's everywhere. Nearly every morning brings a new government report telling us how high the unemployment rate is or how low the stock market is. And, to be sure, we want to give you the news you need - good or bad - that will most help you manage your own money, your own retirement or you own household.

But we also know that a steady onslaught of scary reports is a three-pronged danger. It can become a downward spiral of self-fulfilling alarms, as people reacting to continual negative reports do the very things that cause the economy to stagnate. It can simply add to the depression and anger we all feel about the state of things. And it can numb people to the point that they essentially ignore the reports to which they should be reacting.

At the same time, we do no one any good if we pretend that circumstances are somehow better than they are. Yes, we all need a good dose of cheer to face troubled times, and we all will be happier if we count our blessings rather than dwell on our misfortunes, but simply ignoring trouble can lead to more and deeper trouble. And pretending that small positive signs are more meaningful than they really are only undermines our credibility.

So, in many of our news planning meetings, we've begun giving extra attention to how we play and develop stories about economic news. We don't want to diminish the importance of any single piece of bad news, nor do we want to exaggerate the value of any single glimmer of good news.

But we do want to do our best to keep things in perspective, an effort that has had some interesting effects. In one recent case, we produced a story about local communities forced to make some reductions in their July 4th fireworks programs. Worried that an emphasis on cutbacks might seem overly negative, we headlined the story "Keeping summer spirits up" - a spin that led some editors, looking at it in retrospect this week, to wonder whether we'd accurately described the story we wrote. In another instance, a morning on which our editors themselves couldn't bear another morning of depressing news led to a Page 1 centerpiece in which Jamie Sotonoff showed how some negative events can also have a positive spin. The piece got some of the most positive reader reaction we've received in a long time.

Obviously, you too tire of being slapped in the face every day with new reports of how bad things are. So, we're doing our best not to run around the barnyard screaming about impending catastrophes. We do know the danger of unbridled Pollyanna-ism, though, and keep that in mind in our decision making. But, to repeat that great "Life of Brian" line Sotonoff used in her story, "when chewing on life's gristle," we'll try to make sure you also will still have some reason to "give a whistle" - or at least keep it all in perspective.