One of the things that’s been niggling away at the back of mind lately is the (seemingly) increasing sameness of the blogs I read. More and more, as I plow through them in the morning, they’re all filled with posts on the exact same four or five topics. I used to call them the “outrages of the day,” though of course they’re not all outrages. Some of them are just the ordinary news of the day.
This popped into my mind in a slightly different context today as I made my way through my RSSÂ feeds and found post after post after post about the January jobs report. Some feeds had two or three or even four or five separate posts on the subject. It’s gotten crazy.
Back in the day, blogs posted a bit here and there about monthly economic news, and of course specialty pubs like the Financial Times or the Wall Street Journal would dive a little deeper into them and provide a bit of commentary and reaction. No 
longer. Now, the various reports are greeted every month by an enormous hail of blog posts diving ever deeper and deeper into the details behind the headline numbers. I wonder if it’s time to ease up on this.
I appreciate detail as much as the next guy — more than the next guy, actually — but you know what? It’s a jobs report for one month. There’s only so much it can tell you. Diving deeply into it is sort of like trying to squeeze more significant digits out of a result than went into the inputs. You’re just kidding yourself if you think this level of detail on a single month’s data is really telling us anything.
Apologies if this seems Andy Rooney-ish. But seriously folks. I know it’s an election year, but it’s still only one month of jobs data. Give it the attention it deserves, but no more.
