"The good news: Home sales up in metro area"Jeff Manning starts the article with "Closings jump 17.1% in a month" and of course the headline is skewed to be positive. To be fair he does talk about the fact that closed sales are DOWN 38.1% from Feb. 08.
That's the real news. Closed sales are way down, and don't show any sign of increasing. The increase from January is meaningless, and Jeff should know this.
Real estate sales are seasonal, so comparing month to month variations are meaningless. Of course sales were up in February, they always are. That's not news.
So then why report it? Is it because the Oregonian is heavily reliant on ad revenue from the Real Estate industry, and is afraid of offending them?
I can only assume so.
Frankly, the need to pander to advertisers is why I have lost all respect for serious newspapers. Bloggers might not always get it right, but you can be sure that I don't have any hidden agendas or advertisers that I need to protect.
I honestly believe that most newspapers will be gone soon (as do others) and I can't say I'll miss them. I don't trust much of what I read these days (certainly not on Fox, but also on the mainstream outlets) as most papers are too tied to their advertisers to be neutral.
The Oregonian's web site is also a joke. I can rarely find articles that are in the print section, the front page is a mess, there is no structure, content is hard to find, it's just sad and pathetic all around.
I'll post more about the results later.
