Cumulative or Discrete Numbers: How Should <em>Bloomberg</em> Measure the Bailout?
This case describes one of the more confounding issues that business reporters face on a regular basis: how to use numbers. In late 2010 and March 2011, after a lawsuit, Bloomberg News received thousands of spreadsheets detailing US Federal Reserve System lending to banks during the financial crisis of 2007-10. A team of editors and reporters had to decide first how to make sense of the dense spreadsheets full of acronyms and abbreviations. Then it had to design a database to crunch and organize the data for optimal public understanding.
Case number:
CSJ-13-0051.0
Category:
Journalism Cases
Topics:
financial journalism, government-media relations, data journalism, editorial management
Teaching resources:
Epilogue,
Teaching note