Parade Magazine Says Fewer People Are Coming to Vermont for Fall Foliage Than Ever. Here’s Why You Shouldn’t Believe It.
The importance of asking where the number came from and how it got made, before deciding whether to believe what it’s being used to say.
Every newsroom in America, ours included, relies on some information and articles that land in the inbox, and somebody has to decide what they mean.
Most of the time that’s an honest job. But there’s a version of it that goes sideways, and it usually isn’t a lie — it’s a thread.
Somebody reads a document, finds the one loose end that’s more interesting than the rest of it, and pulls. Pull hard enough and you’ve got a story.
Pull a little too hard and you’ve got a story the document doesn’t actually support: less a finding than a hunch that got dressed up for the occasion, and one that happens to be very, very clickable.
That’s what happened here. Parade ran a piece under the framing that America’s leaf-peepers have moved on from Vermont, and that Stowe — the state’s marquee foliage destination — didn’t even crack the top five. The mechanics are simple enough that it’s worth walking through slowly, because once you see them, you’ll see them everywhere.
Put yourself in the reporter’s chair.
You want to know whether Vermont is drawing fewer fall visitors. What did you actually have to work with?
You had numbers from Priceline — the online travel agency, the one that sells hotel rooms — showing how often people searched its site for hotels in places known for fall color. So you started typing.
You typed Stowe. You got a number.
You typed Adirondacks. You got a much bigger number.
Now, what have you learned? That more people searched hotels in the Adirondacks than searched hotels in Stowe. Fine. Does that mean more people are heading to the Adirondacks than to Stowe? Maybe — though a search isn’t a booking, and a booking isn’t a car on Route 108.
But does it mean more people are going to the Adirondacks than to Vermont?
Not unless you searched Vermont. And nobody did.
Stowe is a village of about five thousand people. The Adirondacks is six million acres holding Lake Placid, Lake George, Saranac Lake and many more towns. The rest of the list runs the same way — the entire Berkshires, a whole Pennsylvania county, the Columbia River Gorge. Vermont was the only place on the board entered as a single town. Type in the Green Mountains instead, or Route 100, or just Vermont, and the whole thing rearranges itself.
So the thread got pulled, and out came a verdict on a Vermont October.
This is the whole job. It’s why Compass Vermont exists.
Ask where the number came from and how it got made, before deciding whether to believe what it’s being used to say. That is the first move at Compass, every single time — whether it’s a magazine, a company, a state agency, or a legislator with a chart.
Usually the answer checks out and the story stands, and you’ll never hear about the checking. Sometimes the answer is that a search box became a trend, and a trend became a headline about your state’s economy ten weeks before the buses arrive.
Compass Vermont was built on the idea that a Vermonter shouldn’t have to take anybody’s word for it — including ours. So when we tell you something, we show you where it came from. Not because national outlets are the enemy, but because a state this small doesn’t get many people doing that work on its behalf, and the claims still keep coming.
Skip that step and you’re not reading news. You’re being told what to think by whoever wrote it that morning, at whatever speed they were writing it.
And for what it’s worth: hotel searches in July tell you nothing about what this season will look like. The rooms and meals receipts do, and those come in after the leaves are down. If anything moves Vermont’s number this fall, the likelier candidate is what’s happening at the Canadian border — not a ranking on a booking site. We’ll see what the numbers say.
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