Media Too Quick to Call Collapse

The Business Press Maven rarely gets spiritual or metaphysical on you, but I will here. Please keep in mind these days -- because the business media never do -- that not everyone comes back from the dead. But most do.

During the last difficult time in the market in the early 2000s, the business media was sick in the head with articles about how everything had changed forever and how online businesses were completely over, finished and done for. Dead.

Then the expansion came, and guess what? Many online businesses came back from the dead and flourished, and the business media was filled with articles about how, in fact, everything had changed forever. This meant that gravity no longer applied to sectors such as real estate or large financial companies. They could be considered invincible.

Then the current difficult time came, and guess what? Industries are not just troubled and struggling. Nope. Everything has changed forever, which means that industries such as financials and real estate are not just troubled. They are dead.

If history has taught us anything, it is that nearly all financial strength and weakness is cyclical. Good times don't last, and neither do the bad.

The problem is that in both good and bad times, the business media are king of the hyperbole. Journalists are short-term-oriented to begin with, which makes anything in-the-moment feel defining.

Add that to the fact that if you are writing about a seismic shift, you are writing a bigger story, and guess what? You tend to go from one overreaction to the next.