Business journalists working hard to cover economy ills

By Heather Schultz

Amid torrents of bad economic news and market turmoil, the public’s anxiety is mounting, and many journalists are working hard to provide clear and meaningful coverage.

“We try to give it a local and regional focus,” said Harriet Johnson Brackey, personal finance columnist with the South Florida Sun-Sentinel. “We have to keep the focus tight and local. push the state agencies hard for local data.”

At The Denver Post, “we try to localize trends,” said Aldo Svaldi, an economics reporter. Denver “led the nation in foreclosure rates, according to Realtytrac, so from the data, we started doing reporting.”

Brackey and Svaldi joined Stuart A. Schweitzer, global markets strategist for JPMorgan Private Bank, and moderator Tom Redburn, deputy business editor of The New York Times, in a SABEW conference call on “covering the economic slowdown and localizing coverage,” on March 26. More than 100 SABEW members dialed in to listen, and many submitted questions. (A recording of the call will be posted at www.sabew.org early next week.)

A major focus of the discussion was real estate, and the panelists agreed that a lot of very good local data was available. While “many banks are not being candid,” Brackey said, brokers and homeowners are good sources, and “Fannie and Freddie have been very helpful.”

Svaldi pointed to the Mortgage Bankers Association’s quarterly survey of mortgage delinquencies, by state and by loan type, and its weekly report on mortgage originations; loanperformance.com’s local data, zillow.com’s valuations on local housing markets and the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight, which publishes a home price index on the state and metro level. (The sites and sources recommended by Svaldi are listed at the end of this article.)

Schweitzer noted that while the volume of sub-prime and jumbo mortgages have declined enormously (“the latter because there’s not a securitized market for them”), the volume of conventional mortgages have “not changed that much.”

Looking ahead, he suggested a housing turnaround will not come until “interest rates – not just Fed rates, but mortgage rates – come down, and there’s been scant movement on that front.”

The credit crunch also drew a lot of suggestions.

By examining state tax receipts, reporters can pinpoint which industries are most affected by the economic slowdown. “We look at it on a monthly basis,” Brackey said. “It’s categorized. We began to see the slowdown appear in building and hardware material.”

Redburn noted that Economy.com, operated by Moody’s, has excellent data and economists on staff who cover every state. One listener on the call emailed in the suggestion that each state’s Department of State maintains a database of Uniform Commercial Code loans that lists the collateral offered by each borrower.

Does the media’s extensive coverage of bad economic news become a negative factor making things worse? Some reporters’ sources complain of that. Schweitzer cautioned that journalists should not let all the dreadful news about the state of the news industry sour their view on the economy overall.

Heather Schultz is a journalism major at Baruch College in New York City and editor-in-chief of its Dollars & Sense magazine.

SABEW’s training page offers tips on covering the economy and other challenging assignments.

Aldo Svaldi of The Denver Post graciously offers these suggestions on localizing economic coverage:

Mortgage Bankers Association, Carolyn Kemp, 202-557-2727, ckemp@mortgagebankers.org
The MBA does a quarterly survey that tracks mortgage delinquencies by state and by loan type. The association also distributes a weekly report on mortgage originations, including the mix of loans for purchase versus refinance.

Loan Performance, Bob Visini, 415-536-3526, bob.visini@loanperformance.com
Loan Performance has local data on the mix of "exotic" loan types including sub-prime, adjustable-rate, interest-only and payment-option ARMS.

Zillow.com, Sarah Mann, 206-818-2429
Zillow provides automated valuations on local housing markets. It recently reported on what percentage of homes in metro areas are worth less than the mortgages backing them.

PMI Group, Stephanie Corns, 925-658-6357
PMI does a risk index looking at what housing markets are most vulnerable to declines.

FDIC State Profiles
The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation reports on economic conditions by state, including how banks are performing. The FDIC covers housing market trends in its reports.

Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight
OFHEO publishes a home price index on the state and metro level. It goes fairly deep on the metro level. The loans it looks at are conforming mortgages issued through Fannie and Freddie.

S&P Chase Shiller Home Price Index, David Guarino, 212-438-1471, Dave_Guarino@standardandpoors.com
This index looks at home price trends across 20 metro areas on a monthly basis. It covers all mortgage types.

RealtyTrac, Jennifer Olson, 415-402-0230, Jennifer@atomicpr.com (outside P.R. firm)
RealtyTrac reports on foreclosure filings by state and metro area on a monthly basis. It counts foreclosures at various stages, so you have to take that into account.

Posted March 28, 2008