By Andy Willard

Data journalism can paint an incredibly accurate picture in ways a journalist simply cannot.

By aggregating millions of tiny bits and pieces of information, a whole representation can be made and trends can be mapped.

The recession that began in 2008 affected almost every American, and journalists across the country scrambled to find the information that had previously been missed.

Data on the housing markets, trades and sales made on Wall Street and deals that had been struck by politicians in Washington, D.C., were collected in a frenzied craze. Not only did the amount of economic news increase, but also the demographic for economics news.

And according to a report issued by the Pew Research Center in 2009, the media problematically approached the narrative from the top down.

The Pew Research Center is a nonpartisan data collector that conducts public opinion polling, demographic research, media content analysis and other such surveys.

The study analyzed data from news stories across all platforms from the beginning of February to the end of August, focusing on front page news, the first 30 minutes of television and radio news programs and the top five stories on large news websites.

It sampled news across all traditional platforms: print, television and radio. It also looked at online news, though all of the sites sampled were affiliated with a major news outlet.

The study concluded that the banking and auto industries, along with political battles over Washington’s finance polices, dominated economics coverage story lines. Other topics, such as retail sales, economics coverage and consumer issues, in general were given very little attention.

It also found that 76 percent of the datelines came out of New York or Washington, D.C.

“Citizens may be the primary victims of the downturn, but they have not been the primary actors in the media depiction of it,”the study reads.

The tone of the study is disapproving at best and condemning at worst. And several business journalists, when shown the study, voiced dissenting opinions with the criticisms, and even concerns with its methodology.

In their minds, the focus not only made sense, but also benefited the average citizen much more than any of the issues that were pushed to the side.

Steve Liesman, CNBC’s senior economics reporter, called the survey seriously flawed.

“How do you report on how much time media and cable reported on the economic crisis without including CNBC?”he asked.

“That seems insane.”

Liesman pointed out that the study neglects several news channels, such as CNBC and Fox Business Network, as well as new media on digital platforms.

“(CNBC) has a person who blogs about housing and retail every single day — I just thought it was weird,”he said.

Allan Murray, president of the Pew Research Center, has a long history of covering national economics. He started working for the Wall Street Journal in 1984 and ultimately became the Washington bureau chief in 2002. After taking a three year break, he returned and wrote a business column.

He said after 2009, there was a historic meltdown of the banks, so it did not surprise him that there was an increased scrutiny on the industry.

Having only taken the helm of the center in January 2013, Murray said he did not want to pass judgment on previous works that had been produced.

But he did say that in this year’s edition of the Pew Center’s annual “State of the Media”report, there was absolutely a sharper focus on newer forms of media.

“There has been a significant increase in attention to digital news outlets. We definitely stepped up our digital coverage,”he said.

By 2009, the transformation of the media was well underway. The Internet had already come to dominate, and mobile applications were thriving. It seems odd that average citizens were already aware of and participating in these new forms of media, but the Pew Research Center seemed reluctant, perhaps dogmatically, to focus in on legacy media.

Judging from the comments of the new president, it seems that the problems were recognized and an attempt has been made to rectify them.

Other experienced economics reporters echoed Murray’s feelings that the added scrutiny on high finance was the right move.

“I agree there was a concentration of news coverage on the banking, auto industry, and the stimulus especially in 2008 and early 2009, with relatively less coverage of the impact on ordinary Americans, not to mention consumer issues,” said Steve Matthews, a Bloomberg News reporter who covers the Federal Reserve Board and economics issues.

“There is a good reason for that,”he added.

He called the economic conditions of 2008 and early 2009 the worst since the 1930s. The struggle to revive the economy was highly controversial, he said. And for better or worse, controversy creates news stories.

Kevin Hall, the chief economics reporter for McClatchy News, worked as a foreign correspondent for most of his career before coming to Washington, D.C., in 2005 to cover economic policy.

He said the attention that the financial issues garnered was deserved because it was primarily driven by the fact that it was what people wanted to hear about.

“The economics beat has become one of the most important beats,”he said.

“During that time, my beat was one that would always be on the front page.”

The Pew study was also critical of the lack of what it called “ordinary voices”in the stories.

“If one looked inside some of larger narratives for a focus on ordinary lives, it was elusive. The narrative about the auto industry’s hard times and plant closings, for instance, accounted for almost one-tenth of all economic coverage. Yet the storyline devoted about labor issues and worker layoffs in the car industry was negligible, filling less than 1 percent,”it reads.

Matthews said that while many of his datelines are out of New York and Washington, D.C., he made an effort to talk to many average citizens — small business owners, unemployed individuals, workers, people who were shopping — to fill out his stories.

“I don’t think, to the extent there was a shortfall of consumer coverage, it had any impact on governing.”

It is admirable that the Pew Center concerned itself with pointing out the lack of ordinary voices in the most high-profile stories.

But in a time of crisis, the only benefit of telling the stories of those affected, as opposed to those leading, is to show the suffering, which represents the gravity of the situation.

That had been done. Everyone understood that this was one of the worst periods in American history. But more than painting a picture of society, journalism is a tool to move society forward regardless of the direction.

That mission could not be completed by only focusing on the horrid effects of the recession. It had to be done by informing the country on the direction that the leaders were taking it.

North Carolina State University Economics Professor Michael Walden said the media’s failure did not lie in its areas of coverage but rather the narrative that was constructed.

“(The financial sector) is like the heart of the economy because it pumps the blood of the economy, which is the credit,”he said.

“It makes sense because that was the crux of the economy.”

He said Americans needed to see these battles that were playing out on the federal level because state policies really have no effect on overcoming a recession.

Citing a problem that was not addressed in the Pew Center’s study, Walden said he believed the media’s need for viewers and subscribers created a space where journalists were putting out stories in an impassioned manner.

“The media perhaps focused too much on creating bad guys and good guys — villains and saviors,”he said.

The study assumes that by not focusing on the consumers, the media gave attention to the “bad guys”the ones that caused the recession in the first place.

Walden said the way the stories were posed created an unnecessary conflict.

“To an economist, greed has no meaning,”he said.

He said economists look at the world in terms of incentives, and what needed to be presented was an unemotional analysis of what happened, why it happened and how it could be prevented in the future.

There’s no doubt that there were several excellent explainer pieces produced during this time —they just did not make the front page. Conflict drives journalism, but if done correctly and without bias, the pros and cons of all sides are presented.

It was all too easy in the wake of the economic fall out to point fingers because that is what citizens wanted to read. They wanted to know whose fault it was that their homes, savings, cars and credit had all been decimated.

One reason this might have come to be is the sheer complexity of the story of the financial meltdown. In the world of high finance, what insiders consider the simplest of terms are complex and multi-layered issues for both average citizens and reporters.

“Mainstream media is not exquisitely equipped to cover the economy. When it broke, they were more likely to rely on Washington and New York for sources,” Matthews said.

His views stand in contrast to what the Pew Center’s study claims about the effect of top-down coverage; it goes as far as to label it Obama-centric coverage.

Though perhaps collected through flawed means, the Pew Center’s data seems accurate. Its conclusions are misleading and unjustly censor the American media.

After the lapse in information that allowed the banking industry to run amok, it would only make sense that the magnifying glass should be aimed at Washington and New York — those in power were the only ones with the ability to help.

“If you knew what was happening there, you would know outcomes better than any individual,” Matthews said. “Interviews in Idaho wouldn’t tell you what was going to happen tomorrow with Citibank or the Treasury.”

Andy Willard is a business journalism student at the UNC-Chapel Hill School of Journalism and Mass Communication

By Meredith Hamrick

While income inequality may have been on the rise since the early 2000s or even earlier, media organizations generally didn’t talk about it much until around 2011, and we’ve seen a second spike in coverage of the topic during the past year.

A Lexis Nexis search revealed that the term “income inequality” appeared in The New York Times 430 times in 2013, compared to 277 in the previous year. CNN.com articles mentioned the term 79 times in 2013 compared to 25 times in the previous year.

Bloomberg Television transcripts contained the term 141 times in 2013 and just 64 times in the previous one.

What’s more, the term barely got any attention at all before 2011. CNN.com and Bloomberg TV transcripts mentioned it just 10 times each in 2010. The Times mentioned it more frequently – some 46 times in 2010 – but at a rate that still pales in comparison to recent coverage of the issue.

When it comes to coverage of income inequality, it’s difficult to tell who started covering it first.

“Bloomberg’s been covering income inequality for a while, and that’s mostly because people have been talking about it for a while,” said Victoria Stilwell, an economics reporter at Bloomberg. “This is something that’s been written about way before Obama – especially on Bloomberg’s end,”

That may be true for Bloomberg’s print operations, but Bloomberg TV transcripts reveal that the term “income inequality” didn’t receive a single mention in segments during 2007 or 2008.

Gus Lubin, deputy editor at Business Insider, said that the site posted its first article on income inequality in early 2010 – a collection of charts showing trends in income inequality that would “blow your mind.” The article, in typical Business Insider fashion, contained 15 charts with short, punchy captions. It ended with a chart captioned “If you aren’t in the top 1 percent of American earners, you’re pretty much screwed.”

“In the early days of our website, that was one of our bigger hits,” Lubin said. “In the next couple of years, lots of people would do similar articles.”

Different explanations exist as to why the term has begun to crop up so much more frequently.

“I think it is influenced by politics,” Lubin said. “We [at Business Insider] don’t have a clear political orientation, but we do like to cover things that people are talking about.”

“Part of it is that things really are getting worse; part of this is that we have new research,” Lubin said, crediting the rise of what he termed the “economic blogosphere” for more in-depth coverage of such seemingly abstract and technical topics as income inequality. More of the work of economists and academics is easily accessible online – and they can publish and share their work much more easily, he said.

Josh Boak, an economics writer at The Associated Press, offered a similar explanation, saying that until recently, reporters didn’t have good measurements for looking at income breakdown. “We had the Gini coefficient, but pre-Piketty, we really didn’t have a great way to look at the top 1 percent, 0.1 percent, 0.01 percent of earners,” he said in an email.

The Piketty reference is Thomas Piketty, a French economist whose most recently released book “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” has topped best-seller lists. In it, he seeks to alarm readers of the dangerous effects that wealth inequality has on social mobility. He suggests an 80 percent tax on incomes above $500,000 in order to level the playing field between those who inherit wealth and those who don’t.

George Washington University economics professor Joann Weiner offered a few potential reasons for the increased media attention granted to income inequality, but she said she thinks that much of the increase in coverage has to do with the recovery since the 2008 economic crisis. She said that many of the most wealthy lost a lot of their investment wealth in the downturn, but they have begun to recover that wealth, so we are again seeing rising wealth inequality.

She also credited the conversation around the 2012 presidential election with increasing media coverage. “During the 2012 election, there was much made of the fact that Romney made a lot of money and he didn’t pay a lot of taxes.”

“Economists have known about this data for a long time,” she said. Weiner also said Piketty’s work has been influential in bringing the issue of income inequality to the public eye.

Henry Blodget, co-founder and editor in chief of Business Insider, has written numerous opinion pieces about income inequality, warning of its potentially disastrous effects on the economy and on the lives of average Americans. Though he’s in a high-level editorial position, he hasn’t hesitated to make his opinions known on the issue. He wrote a 2012 article titled “Dear America: You should be mad as hell about this.”

“Some people call him an idiot or a Marxist; some people think he is spot on,” Lubin said. “He takes a pointed angle to it.”

When considering income inequality, one question that might come to mind is this: How is income inequality measured, and are all economists using the same measurements?

The short answer to that question is that there are several popular ways of measuring income inequality, but nearly all show some increase in the phenomenon in recent years.

The Gini coefficient is perhaps the oldest and most familiar of these measurements, and it is often used to compare income inequality among different countries. A perfectly income-equal society would have a Gini index of zero while a “perfectly unequal” society would have an index of 100. The Gini coefficient is helpful for looking at the large-scale picture, but it doesn’t necessarily capture more subtle patterns.

Piketty famously uses the capital-to-income ratio to determine levels of wealth inequality. He looks at the amount of money that is stored in inherited wealth versus the amount of money that is actively circulating through incomes. When the capital-to-income ratio become too high, he argues, we see a more and more unequal society where most of the money is in the hands of the extremely wealthy.

These are just a couple of ways to look at income inequality – many others exist.

Knowing that there are many different ways to measure and study income inequality raises the question: Do reporters understand all this data well enough to explain it to everyone else?

“These are complex issues, and reporters – myself included – do not always understand them,” Lubin said. “If people make mistakes, they get corrected.”

That said, Lubin insisted that reporters covering the economy are constantly reading each other’s articles and that they learn from each other over time. “On the whole, there are a lot of people in the media that understand this better than they did a few years ago.”

Weiner warned against the kind of press coverage that doesn’t contextualize inequality data well enough and doesn’t deal frankly with the options for fixing it. “I welcome the media coverage, but I think that if you leave it at the 30,000-foot coverage, you’re missing the story.”

She said she thinks that while worrying about income inequality may draw readers, she doesn’t believe it’s worth the amount of attention it receives. “It’s all in the top 0.01 percent – that’s where you get all the fun stories,” she said. “There’s no inequality once you get rid of the tippy top. To me, it’s not worth worrying about.”

It’s not as much fun to write that story though, she said.

“You probably get better reporting in the financial press rather than the popular press,” Weiner said. She used the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times and the Financial Times as examples of such financial publications that offer quality coverage.

“Not every reporter can have a Ph.D. in economics like I do,” she added.

Weiner said there is still a lot of controversy among economists as to how growing income inequality will affect the economy in the long term – and whether it makes sense to try to curb income inequality through redistributive programs or other means.

The best argument to reduce income inequality, she said, is that when income inequality gets to be too large, the wealthy may take over the political processes and shape the society into one that better suits their interests.

Boak said that as a reporter he has spoken with economists who span the ideological spectrum and who have different ideas about how income inequality may affect economic growth in the future. “The primary difference of opinion that exists is we don’t really know the consequences.”

Weiner wrote an article for the Washington Post in January titled “Four reasons why Obama can’t do much about income inequality.” In it she cites data from Alan Krueger, Obama’s former chief economist, showing that the rich are seeing their incomes increase at a much more rapid rate than are the middle classes.

She argues that luck – who your parents are – is the biggest factor in determining where you’ll fall in the income distribution. She also notes that fewer people are marrying those with different levels of education. In other words, we see very few couples these days in which one spouse has a college or graduate degree and the other spouse has just a high school diploma. Finally, she cites the increasing cost of a college education as a barrier to social mobility.

The only one of these factors that’s really fixable is the cost of college, said Weiner.

Readers are used to the income inequality coverage now. They’ve been hearing about it for a few years. “At this point you have to be saying something interesting,” Lubin said. He said interesting charts and graphs and an interview with someone who knows a lot about the economy are all features that tend to bring readers to an article.

Most of his articles on the topic come from reading data-laden reports – not from talking to economists, and he tends to target the average American, Lubin said.

Regarding growing income inequality, Boak says he thinks that the American public senses it on the ground level – whether by a failure to get a raise or other means. “I think that the public tends to have a pretty good awareness,” he said. “They know that something’s off.”

Hamrick is a business journalism senior at UNC-Chapel Hill. She will intern at the Triangle Business Journal this summer.

By Kelci Hight

In the last three years, since Elisabeth DeMarse was appointed as the new CEO of TheStreet, the company has undergone a drastic redesign.

Under her direction, the financial news website has overhauled its editorial staff and changed its business staff. The result has been an improved financial performance and a larger presence in financial media.

The company’s portfolio of business and personal finance brands includes TheStreet, RealMoney, RealMoney Pro, Stockpickr, Action Alerts PLUS, Options Profits, MainStreet and RateWatch. Martin Perez and CNBC’s Jim Cramer originally founded it in 1996. Despite the initial buzz, the site wasn’t able to meet expectations.

Then came DeMarse.

DeMarse earned a reputation as a cutthroat turnaround specialist after rescuing Bankrate, a personal finance website, from bankruptcy in 2000.

When she left Bankrate after four and a half years, DeMarse had moved the stock from near extinction to a high of more than $50 a share. Since Bankrate, she launched DemarseCo, where she consolidated Internet properties related to education and credit cards. After that, she was appointed as CEO of CreditCards.com before settling on TheStreet.

DeMarse employs many of the same strategies she used in these past endeavors to encourage success at TheStreet.

Last year, she let go of 100 TheStreet.com employees and according to the New York Observer, “took a blow torch” to the entire ad sales department, bringing in a new team from Forbes.

Video Production

Part of the new team is assignment editor and head of video content, Ruben Ramirez.

“One of Elisabeth’s major initiatives when she came to TheStreet was putting resources into building a good video product.” Ramirez said. Recently, the company built a new state-of-the art studio that includes live video capabilities.

“When you’re in an environment like we’re in, where content is ad supported, video is the last place you can get a lot money for ads,” Ramirez added. The company makes around $30 to $40 each time a video is viewed.

Currently, he produces about 30 videos a day between TheStreet.com, MainStreet.com and TheDeal.com, but by the end of the year, he hopes to be putting out 60. The videos extend across 13 channels, including Cramer On Demand, and aim to cover compelling financial news, like stock market commentary and interviews with high profile executives. The studio’s Wall Street location makes it easy for CEOs to stop by on their way to the New York Stock Exchange.

When asked how he balances the content on each site, Ramirez explained that it was easy because each site had its own personality. TheStreet.com covers market-focused stocks and trends, while Mainstreet.com consists of more personal financial advice, such as strategies for paying student debt or getting a loan for a car. Premium site, TheDeal.com, focuses on institutional mergers and acquisitions, but without the advertisements.

Ramirez is especially excited about the company’s increasing attention to the development of mobile and tablet applications. TheStreet understands the importance of media consumption through mobile devices and application development is yet another way for TheStreet to stay ahead of the curve.

“We’ve taken TheStreet’s deep editorial content, videos, data and tools and packaged them into two powerful iPad and iPhone apps,” said DeMarse in a statement. “They are the perfect balance of substance and style, setting us apart from other financial news apps. These apps are a terrific leap ahead, and users can expect a regular stream of updates going forward, including new apps for Android and BlackBerry, as well as fully integrated access to our leading paid subscription services, all in one intuitive platform.”

She added that apps for Android and Blackberry would be available soon.

Enhancing video and creating mobile applications are just some of DeMarse’s many tactics to bring visitors to the flagship site and subsequently entice potential advertisers.

Advertisers are content with paying more in order to reach an audience characteristic of the one TheStreet appeals to. ComScore, an independent Web measurement company, ranked it first among financial media websites for delivering the difficult-to-reach mass affluent demographic. TheStreet readers also ranked first in household income over $100,000 and second in portfolio value of more than $1 million.

TheStreet.com advertisers include WisdomTree, Oppenheimer, TradeStation, Spider, Prudential, Schwab, BlackRock, Emirates, and more.

Ramirez said that his typical viewer has an investment portfolio and money to spend. He called TheStreet.com, “ESPN for financial news junkies.” Ramirez is always working to make sure his audience knows the latest stats for financial news, through video when he feels the content lends itself that way.

“Once news is old, it’s not valuable,” he added.

TheStreet announced in January that it would also be sponsoring the public television series ‘Nightly Business Report.’ Tyler Mathisen and Susie Gharib produce the CNBC show. Having TheStreet’s name on the business television program will further aid DeMarse’s efforts to stay ahead and gain attention.

In addition, TheStreet takes advantage of social media engagement on multiple platforms, like Twitter and Facebook.

DeMarse emphasized the new editor in chief, Janet Guyon’s, experience in digital journalism.

“The digital journalist of today must be skilled at doing video, social media, and incorporating search engine optimization, as well as developing sources and writing stories. They need to have charisma, as well as content. Janet is a true digital journalist and editor with a strong history in real-time financial markets and business coverage.”

Managing talent

Part of the redesign involved putting together a multi-faceted team of contributors.

“Elisabeth’s focus was on having a true multimedia newsroom. Everyone has to know how to write, do video and be good at social media,” Ramirez said.

In March, the company announced that it would be paying contributors based on page views.

A contributor that receives 20,000 page views for an article in a seven-day period will be paid $20. One that receives 40,000 page views for an article in a seven-day period will be paid $40. And a contributor that writes an article that receives 60,000 page views in a week will be paid $50.

As the page views increase, so does the author’s check.

DeMarse wrote, “Our goal is to attract smart, influential writers, analysts and money managers to augment the work of our newsrooms, and who want to be a part of our mission. This is an important initiative personally led by Jim Cramer to attract the best and brightest stock minds to join our publisher platform.”

Brad Thomas has been a contributor for TheStreet for nearly three years. He also writes for competitors, Seeking Alpha, Forbes.com, The Motley Fool and The Commercial Observer. He says TheStreet isn’t the only site paying him based on page views.

The pay isn’t much, he says, “but it’s a great way to build a platform.” Thomas said his writings on TheStreet.com have helped him gain credibility and promote his newsletter, The Intelligent REIT Investor.

“Most of my subscribers come from articles that I have written,” Thomas said.

“I write frequently because it gives me a competitive advantage in research and also because it helps me build credibility. I write about companies with ‘wide moat’ so I suppose I should also write with a wide moat based strategy.”

Some feel that TheStreet keeps too many writers on its payroll, but recruiting contributors is part of DeMarse’s goal to deepen coverage of markets and expand breadth of topics.

Subscription services

Along with collecting apt talent, DeMarse has strived to increase the profitable subscription aspect of the site. At the end of the third quarter in 2013, subscription services accounted for $11.4 million, making up 80 percent of TheStreet’s total revenue.

Herb Greenberg has been a financial journalist for more than 30 years. He recently left CNBC to rejoin TheStreet after 16 years, thanks to the site’s willingness to work with him on a subscription product. He writes a daily blog for TheStreet’s main free website and contributes to Real Money’s “Columnist Conversation” column, but his main focus is his position as editor of Herb Greenberg’s Reality Check.

Reality Check is a subscription newsletter designed for institutional and sophisticated investors interested in identifying issues that may impact their investment process. Subscribers receive a constant stream of information about businesses and opportunities that have the potential to benefit their investment capital.

When asked how he persuades readers to subscribe, Greenberg said that the process is in transition to TheStreet’s “The Deal” organization, which is more institutional in nature.

As Reality Check aligns itself more closely with The Deal, Greenberg says, “Sales will transition from ‘free trial’ classic retail marketing to an active knock-on-door selling.”

The Deal is a media company, which coincidentally, covers the mergers and acquisition market. The acquisition of The Deal in 2012 was one of DeMarse’s first actions as CEO and it proved to be a good one. Moving the M&A magazine exclusively online helped to generate interest in the subscription part of the site. In 2011, 8 percent of subscribers were acquired via the free site. By 2013, it grew to 33%.

“While many of our competitors have struggled with the shifting sands of online advertising, we have refined our free site as an acquisition funnel for our subscription newsletters,” DeMarse said in a conference call. She noted that TheStreet has a competitive advantage due to dual monetization of the audience visiting the flagship free site.

The type of audience TheStreet attracts is less price-sensitive and more willing to pay for information that provides realistic, actionable advice. According to Greenberg, business journalism’s audience is more receptive to paid services than other online media divisions.

“As making money in media is being hashed out, part of the equation is and will be premium-priced products that are not commodity in nature and add a perceived level of value. Business and investment journalism is a natural for premium-priced products,” Greenberg said.

TheStreet also acquired DealFlow Media Inc. The financial newsletter and database company includes The DealFlow Report, The Life Settlements Report and the PrivateRaise database.

The integration of The Deal and Dealflow Media has led to a generous rise in revenue for TheStreet’s subscription services.

DealFlow founder and former CEO, Steven Dresner, said in a statement, “The combination of our leading small cap finance content with The Deal’s M&A reporting is a natural fit. TheStreet has used The Deal’s content as a growth platform to help increase revenue from subscription and licensing services.”

The future

When DeMarse first stepped in, Cramer warned the new CEO that TheStreet would be “a complete mess,” but that only seemed to inspire her and 2013 proved to be a much better year for the company.

In March, the site reported a fourth-quarter profit of nearly $213,000 compared to a loss of $2.2 million in the same quarter of 2012. The number of paid subscriptions was 78,400, an increase of 20.9 percent from the prior year. The company reported revenue of $54.5 million total, a 7.4 percent increase. The net loss for the year was $3.8 million compared to a net loss of $12.7 million the year before.

Hight is a business journalism major at the UNC-Chapel Hill School of Journalism and Mass Communication