Beware alarming business stories that get a lot of news coverage 🗞️

Interesting news and valuable news aren't always the same thing 📰

Just because a story gets a lot of news coverage doesn’t necessarily mean it’s representative of what’s going on in the world.

This is an issue with news, a business that’s incentivized to address its audience’s interests and not necessarily its needs.

Consider news coverage of layoffs. If you’ve been following the news, then you’ve probably seen multiple stories about companies announcing what appear to be major layoffs. You might even think the economy is in the throes of mass layoffs across industries.

According to Bloomberg data cited by BofA, which you can see in the chart above, the weekly volume of news stories mentioning layoffs spiked to record levels recently.¹ These include articles covering layoffs at Meta, Amazon, Twitter, and Salesforce.

But as discussed in the Nov. 14 TKer, many of these announcements have been concentrated in the tech sector, which is responsible for less than 3% of total employment in the U.S.