So I read the news. Thanks to RSS, I read lots of different sources of news, relatively quickly. So today I can across something very... different:

Layoffs rise 68% in April vs May

Planned job cuts in U.S. companies totaled 90,015 last month, up from 53,579 in March and up 27 percent from a year earlier, employment consulting firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc. reported.

The April layoffs were the steepest since the 100,315 cuts announced in September 2006.

Later on in my reading I see: Employers cut fewer jobs in April, which quotes:

But in April the losses totaled 20,000, an improvement from the 81,000 reductions in payrolls logged in March.

Now obviously they're measuring something different, because even March's number are different for both articles. But a) the headlines make it out to sound the same, and b) ummm... sounds like it should be simple "the number of people who don't have a job to go to in May, but did have a job to go to in April".

Yeah, ok, maybe it's a half-glass-full kind of thing... but there's a difference of 70,000... or more than 3 times the number in the last article. That's more than glass-half-full.