Assessing the Black Friday coverage

The coverage of today’s retail shopping story was all across the map — literally. In Arizona, the story was about shoppers eschewing the mall for the great outdoors, while in Maine, the story was shoppers heading to the mail to avoid the weather.

That’s what makes covering the frenzy of shoppers on the day after Thanksgiving so difficult, especially for national reporters. There is typically no consensus on what happened during the day.

However, that didn’t prevent the business media from offering their analysis about what happened in the malls and shopping centers and major retailing areas on Friday.

Here is a sample:

— Reuters said Friday could be one of the “best in years,” quoting the Federated CEO, who was outside of Macy’s in New York at 5:30 a.m.

— The AP’s Anne D’Innocenzio focused on the trend that some retailers are now opening their doors at midnight to lure shoppers into their locations even earlier.

— Bloomberg’s main story about retail shopping lead with the quote from the head of the National Retail Federation that crowds were “huge.” Remember, these are the people who last year sold biz journalists the story about Black Monday being the biggest day of the year for online retail sales. I’d like to see some hard data before I believe them again.

— Speaking of Black Monday, Marketwatch’s Ben Charny has a smart story about the online retailing hype. Charny wrote, “Most of the attention of analysts and investors has been focused on two days: the Friday after Thanksgiving, known as Black Friday, and the following Monday, which some misguided e-marketers have dubbed Cyber Monday. Yet neither of those days ranked among the top five online shopping days of 2005, according to several research firms, including Internet traffic tracker comScore Networks and eBay Inc.’s PayPal service, the largest processor of online payments.”

— The Wall Street Journal also went with the stronger-than-expected crowd showings as its focus, but its reporting also noted that those same shoppers may not return when the sales and discounts stop.

My favorite story of the day was one from the Atlanta Constitution, where reporter Keri Smith found a Limited store manager who started her Christmas shopping at midnight because she had to be at work at her store at 10 a.m. Store managers got to shop too. What a nice change of pace from the rest of the stories, which quoted regular shoppers.