Labor Department suspends changes to economic data release

The Labor Department is suspending a plan to change how it releases economic data, in a win for financial-media firms that had lobbied against the changes, reports Alexander Osipovich of The Wall Street Journal.

Osipovich reports, “The department had said in January that it would release market-moving data primarily through the internet, thwarting media firms that release the same data electronically over data feeds to customers, including high-speed trading firms. Officials from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the unit of the department that generates such data, argued that posting it online would be fairer to investors.

“But the planned policy change prompted fears it could cause the bureau’s website to crash because traders seeking to grab the data would barrage the site with traffic as soon as the data was posted.

“The proposal had caught media companies by surprise. BLS Commissioner William Beach said in a letter to media organizations Wednesday that the agency was postponing the new policy as it considered further changes to how it released data. ‘We continue to be committed to the secure, equitable, orderly and timely dissemination of statistical data,’ he wrote.”

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Chris Roush

Chris Roush was the dean of the School of Communications at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut. He was previously Walter E. Hussman Sr. Distinguished Professor in business journalism at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is a former business journalist for Bloomberg News, Businessweek, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Tampa Tribune and the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. He is the author of the leading business reporting textbook "Show me the Money: Writing Business and Economics Stories for Mass Communication" and "Thinking Things Over," a biography of former Wall Street Journal editor Vermont Royster.