Our R-Word Index soars
After writing about some economists who still don’t think we’re in a recession, I thought it would be interesting to revisit the Post-Dispatch R-Word Index. As regular readers will recall, the Economist magazine found a correlation between actual recessions and mentions of the word “recession,” so I set out to build a local R-Word index. When I blogged about this in January, the index had risen but not to an alarming level.
Well, we’re sounding the alarm now. In the first 98 days of 2008, the Post-Dispatch has used the R-word in 896 stories. That’s not too far below the 1,015 mentions in all of 2001, which was a recession year. And if we keep using the word at the same rate all year, the 2008 total will be more than 3,200 stories, which will be a record.
The P-D’s electronic archives go back to 1981. Since then, the recession year of 1991 was the only time we even topped 2,000 mentions of the R-word.
What do you think, readers? Are we providing you the data and analysis you need to cope with a fast-changing economy? Or are we being unnecessarily alarmist?
(2 votes, average: 3.5 out of 5)
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David Nicklaus has covered St. Louis business for more than 25 years. His column appears three days a week on the Post-Dispatch business page. 
Seems to me you guys like to bandy that term about without actually explaining to readers what it means. Your big feature last week on what exactly it means to be in the “roller coaster” that is the recession was wholly disappointing—it never actually gave anything other than a completely dumbed down version of what a recession means and how it’s determined, preferring instead to focus on what it physically/existentially feels like to be on a roller coaster. Bravo…