Atrios gets at the underlying problem with assigning journalists to “trends” beats: We aren’t typical consumers of culture; nor do our friends tend to be.
At NPR, when I was (briefly) assigned as “cultural trends correspondent”, the Assistant Managing Editor who supervised my desk kept pushing me to do two stories, one on women in late middle age having kids, the other on a certain TV show that was newly on the air.
I dug a bit and found that the rate at which women 35-45 were giving birth hadn’t changed; there’d simply been a slew of pregnancies among DC journalists in that age range. Likewise, the ratings for the show in question skewed to women 35-45 with college degrees, i.e. women much like the aforementioned Assistant Managing Editor.
I never did the stories.
Heh. You’ve identified the fundamental problem: lack of rigor when identifying “trends”. If anyone’s going to publish a trend story, I’d like to see some statistical confirmation that it is a trend. If not, no story. If it is, there’s a 99% chance I still don’t want to see it as a story, because trend stories are a bit like survey stories. You’re either telling me something I already know, or telling me about what other people are doing and I don’t care. Very occasionally a trend story works but only if (a) it’s a real phenomenon and (b) there is something interesting to be said about it.