BoingBoing posted a fascinating article (as opposed to linking to one) that traces the creation of a fake news story. The story of "Black Friday"--the big shopping weekend after Thanksgiving--was already written before the weekend was finished, and was not the work of journalists, but of a press release. How the press release is used without question as "fact" shows how crummy most of our journalism is these days.
Note that this story is built with two pieces of information: it has numbers and it offers an explanation for those numbers. It's really the perfect story, regardless of whether it's true or not. More importantly, the information attempts to provide an answer to a reasonable question: "How busy was Thanksgiving weekend for retailers?" and one can *not* leave the question unanswered. The possible answers are "up, down or flat." The answer "We don't really know" is not acceptable; it's not news. So the press release provides an answer that Thanksgiving Weekend sales were up significantly and an answer that the NRF people like. That answer is also believable because a national industry trade group had real data to back up its claim.One might also want to point out that there is no real opposing trade group here to offer a counter-claim. Those who don't shop over the weekend aren't represented by anyone with a commercial interest in this question. Also, I should mention that the "big" story the day before Thanksgiving is how many people are traveling for the holidays, and how crowded the roads and airports are. That story doesn't seem to have any impact on the post-Thanksgiving story, which says everyone was shopping.
The NRF "news release" thus becomes news, variously massaged and distributed by news services. You might think of it as a kind of journalistic mash-up.