Another issue with NYTimes story on online sales slowing

TheStreet.com’s Marek Fuchs takes a look at the New York Times article on how online retail sales are slowing that was criticized earlier this week by Slate.com’s Jack Shafer.

But Fuchs has more issues with this trend story than the fact that its use of numbers in explaining the trend was less than stellar. In particular, he wants to know about the math in the story when it stated that Expedia had tripled the number of kiosks on high-travel areas.

Fuchs wrote, “The Business Press Maven called Expedia to get the answer. Last year at this time, they had 76 kiosks. This year, they have, um, 93. All are concentrated in five markets (where excursions are particularly popular). So to make the case that this is some widespread thing is spurious, but the big thing, obviously, is the issue of having ‘tripled’ — 76 to 93? The number of kiosks obviously hasn’t tripled recently, which was the implication. And if, by chance, they were referring to tripling off a base of 30 some years ago, all in an isolated number of markets, well …

“Katie Deines, a spokesperson for Expedia, who was about to call to ask for a ticket to Correction City, told me she was just puzzled: ‘I don’t even know where they got the tripling,’ she said.

“The point, as always, is not to pick on any journalist for an error. We all make mistakes in our work. It is just that the trend story is often a reach, and reaching under time pressure usually leads to mistakes and misjudgments, from quoting a woman-on-the-street who is hardly a disinterested party to committing cruel and unusual punishment against a statistic you are using for supporting evidence.”

Read more here.