Writing About Shipping and Prices: A Guide for Journalists

The Seven Most Common Mistakes

Coverage of shipping costs and their relationship to consumer prices is more prominent now than at any point since the 2021 supply chain crisis. Major outlets run freight-rate stories weekly. But the same errors recur, often because the story template has been inherited rather than reconstructed from first principles. The following are the mistakes that appear most frequently in published coverage.

Explaining TEUs to a General Audience

The TEU -- twenty-foot equivalent unit -- is the standard measure of container shipping capacity and the unit in which container freight rates are quoted. It refers to a standard 20-foot intermodal container: 20 feet long, 8 feet wide, 8.5 feet tall. The more commonly used container in practice is the 40-foot container, which equals 2 TEUs. When rates are quoted "per FEU" (forty-foot equivalent unit), they refer to the 40-foot box that actually gets loaded onto a ship.

For a general audience, the most useful framing is physical. A single 40-foot container holds approximately 20-25 tons of manufactured goods: roughly 8,000 pairs of sneakers, or 12,000 bottles of wine, or 60,000 bananas, or a single prefabricated house in kit form. A large container ship carries 20,000-24,000 TEUs, or roughly 10,000-12,000 forty-foot containers stacked in the hold and on deck. One fully loaded ship carries enough consumer goods to supply a mid-sized American city for several days.

The per-unit shipping cost is often the most useful number for consumer-facing stories. If a container of 8,000 pairs of sneakers costs $3,000 to ship from Vietnam to the US West Coast, the ocean freight per pair is $0.37. If the rate triples to $9,000, the per-pair cost rises to $1.12 -- an increase of $0.75 per pair. On a $120 shoe, that is a 0.6% increase in the landed cost. This arithmetic should accompany every story that reports freight rate increases in headline terms, because without it, readers have no way to assess the proportional impact on the products they actually buy.

The Data Sources Worth Citing

Not all freight rate indices measure the same thing, and citing the wrong one undermines the precision of a story. The following are the most frequently referenced indices, what they measure, and when to use each.

The most common citation error is using the BDI when the story is about consumer goods. The Baltic Dry Index measures dry bulk freight rates -- iron ore, coal, grain, cement. It has no direct relationship to the cost of shipping containerized consumer products. The BDI may be rising because China is buying more iron ore, while container rates on the trans-Pacific are simultaneously falling. Using the BDI as a proxy for "shipping costs" in a consumer-goods story is like using wholesale beef prices as a proxy for restaurant menu prices. The underlying commodity may be related, but the transmission is indirect and unreliable over short timeframes.

Avoiding False Precision

Shipping economics involves real numbers -- measurable rates, countable containers, trackable vessels. This creates a temptation toward false precision in reporting. A story that says "the disruption will add $0.47 to the cost of a gallon of milk" is presenting a calculation that depends on at least six assumptions, each with significant uncertainty bands. The final number carries an implied precision that the underlying methodology cannot support.

The responsible approach is to report ranges and orders of magnitude. "Freight cost increases are likely to add between $0.10 and $0.50 per gallon to dairy products over the next three to six months, depending on how long the disruption lasts and whether carriers absorb some of the cost increase" is less headline-friendly but substantially more accurate than a single point estimate.

When an analyst or industry source provides a specific number -- "this will cost the average American family $840 per year" -- the journalist's job is to ask how that number was calculated. What freight rate increase was assumed? Over what duration? What pass-through rate from freight to retail was used? What categories of consumer spending were included? An $840 estimate built on a 200% sustained freight rate increase for twelve months with 100% pass-through produces a very different implied claim than the same headline number built on a 50% increase for six months with 40% pass-through. The former is an extreme scenario; the latter is roughly the 2022 experience.

The BLS Consumer Expenditure Survey provides the baseline data for estimating household impacts. Average US household spending on food is approximately $10,000-12,000 per year. On gasoline, $3,000-5,000. On clothing, $1,500-2,000. These are the categories most directly affected by shipping cost changes. A 5% increase across all three categories -- which would be a significant, multi-month shipping disruption -- produces roughly $750-1,000 in additional annual cost. That is real money, but it is not the catastrophic figures that sometimes appear in coverage.

Explaining the Transmission Mechanism

The most useful service a journalist can provide in shipping coverage is explaining the mechanism, not just the outcome. Readers are told that shipping disruptions raise prices. They are rarely told how, at what speed, through which channels, and with what magnitude. The transmission mechanism from a chokepoint closure to a price increase at the checkout counter involves a specific chain of events, each with a known approximate lag.

Week 1-2: Chokepoint closes or rates spike. Vessel operators announce route diversions or blank sailings. Spot container rates increase. This is the event that generates the initial news coverage.

Week 2-4: Carriers impose emergency surcharges (bunker adjustment, war risk premium, congestion surcharge). Freight forwarders pass these through to importers. The cost increase is real but has not yet reached any consumer product.

Month 1-2: Goods shipped at the higher rate begin arriving at US ports. Importers receive invoices reflecting the elevated freight costs. Importers begin adjusting their own pricing to reflect higher landed costs, or absorb the difference temporarily, compressing margins.

Month 2-4: Higher import costs flow into wholesale prices (measured by PPI). Retailers begin adjusting shelf prices, typically with a further lag as existing inventory at the old cost is sold through.

Month 3-6: Consumer prices (measured by CPI) begin reflecting the accumulated cost increases. The BLS publishes data with a one-month lag, so a price increase that reaches the shelf in June appears in the July CPI release, published in August.

This timeline means that a chokepoint disruption in January is typically not measurable in CPI data until May or June at the earliest. Reporting that a January disruption "is already pushing up consumer prices" in February is almost certainly wrong -- the goods shipped at elevated rates have not yet arrived, been distributed, and reached the shelf in sufficient volume to move the national price statistics.

Where to Find Expert Sources

Shipping economics sits at the intersection of several professional communities, and finding credible on-the-record sources requires knowing where to look.

Industry analysts: Drewry, Clarksons Research, Alphaliner, and Sea-Intelligence provide commercial analysis of shipping markets. Their analysts regularly speak to media and can provide data-backed assessments of rate trends, fleet capacity, and demand forecasts. Xeneta publishes a monthly market report with contract rate trends and commentary. Lars Jensen, formerly of Sea-Intelligence and now an independent analyst, is among the most-quoted shipping economists in global media and maintains an active presence on LinkedIn.

Academic economists: The maritime economics research community is small but rigorous. Costas Grammenos at City, University of London has edited the foundational Handbook of Maritime Economics. Martin Stopford's Maritime Economics remains the standard textbook. Academic researchers can provide the causal framework and historical context that industry analysts sometimes lack, though they are typically slower to comment on breaking events.

International organizations: UNCTAD's Review of Maritime Transport, published annually, is the most comprehensive single-document overview of the global shipping industry and its economic significance. The OECD's International Transport Forum produces peer-reviewed research on transport policy and economics. The IMF and World Bank both publish commodity market analyses that incorporate shipping dynamics.

Government data: The Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes the Import/Export Price Indexes. The Census Bureau publishes trade statistics including the Advance Economic Indicators report. The US Energy Information Administration (EIA) publishes weekly petroleum data including tanker charter rates for crude oil imports. All of these are free, public, and citable without restriction.

Carrier executives and filings: The quarterly earnings calls of Maersk, ZIM, Hapag-Lloyd, and other publicly listed carriers contain detailed commentary on market conditions, booking trends, and rate expectations. Transcripts are available through SEC filings (for US-listed companies) or investor relations pages. These calls are among the richest primary sources for current freight market conditions because the executives are speaking under securities law obligations and cannot materially misrepresent their business outlook.

How Risk and Route Can Help

Risk and Route is built specifically to bridge the gap between raw shipping data and consumer-facing economic analysis. Our indices -- the Route Disruption Index, the Household Fuel Risk Index, and Chokepoint Severity Scores -- synthesize multiple data streams into single numbers designed to be citable and interpretable. Each index comes with full methodology documentation, including the weights, data sources, and limitations.

For journalists on deadline, we offer several resources:

The Learning Center (where you are now) provides structured background on every concept relevant to shipping-price analysis. Each module is written to be accessible to a non-specialist reader while maintaining the precision necessary for accurate reporting.

The Indices page provides current and historical values for our proprietary indices, with plain-language explanations of what each number means and how it should be interpreted.

Data attribution: All Risk and Route data is free to cite with attribution. We ask only that stories referencing our indices include the source name and, where possible, a link to the methodology page.

We are not a wire service and do not provide real-time quotes or breaking news. Our value is in the analytical framework -- converting raw rate data, vessel tracking, and economic indicators into consumer-relevant signals that can be cited, explained, and verified.

A Note on Narrative Framing

Shipping stories tend toward two default framings, both of which distort the underlying reality.

The crisis frame treats every rate increase as a harbinger of economic catastrophe. "Shipping costs are skyrocketing" paired with images of stacked containers implies imminent, severe consumer impact. Sometimes this framing is warranted -- the 2021 supply chain crisis genuinely produced sustained, severe cost increases. More often, rate spikes are short-lived, partially absorbed by carriers and intermediaries, and produce modest consumer price effects that are difficult to isolate from other inflation drivers.

The dismissal frame treats shipping as invisible infrastructure that is always fine and not worth covering. This was the default framing before 2020, and it left most readers, policymakers, and business owners completely unprepared when the system broke. Shipping's reliability in normal times does not make it unimportant; it makes its failures more consequential precisely because so few contingency plans exist.

The most accurate framing is structural: shipping is a critical, generally reliable, but increasingly stressed system. Its costs are real but proportional. Its disruptions are consequential but bounded. The data exists to quantify these relationships with reasonable precision, and the mechanisms are well-understood enough that informed forecasting is possible. Good shipping journalism occupies the space between panic and complacency -- documenting real risks, quantifying real costs, and providing readers with the context to assess what a disruption actually means for their lives and businesses.

Key Takeaways