Growth figures are not a scoreboard

This is fictional sample content, created to demonstrate the layout. The places, people and figures in it are invented. It is not reporting.

The first estimate of quarterly growth is published on roughly forty per cent of the data that will eventually exist. It is revised at the second estimate, and again at the third.

Newsrooms know this. We report the first estimate on the day, in the largest type available, and the revisions in a paragraph, if at all.

The effect is not that readers are misinformed about one number. It is that they acquire a picture of the economy assembled almost entirely from first estimates.

A modest discipline would help: report the revision with the same prominence as the original, or hold the story until the second estimate. The first option is honest. The second is better.