For years I was a journalist, never in the big time, but at various weekly newspapers in the New York City area; I covered a wide variety of stories, from school boards, the cop beat, to sports, and I think ever afterward I have kept a reporter’s sensibility about things. An intellectual curiosity, if you will.

You may get a chuckle out of this, but when I finally worked in a more traditional office setting, I tended to go around to people’s offices and share news tidbits I had found. Ditto for company staff meetings. I was basically repeating what I used to do when working at a paper: bouncing things off colleagues. The old “what story do you have this week?” kind of comparing and brainstorming.

More often than not my newsroom mentality didn’t translate well, my enthusiasm for what was happening, even in our industry, wasn’t always shared; sometimes my comments just fell flat. Kind of mildly funny in retrospect.

Let me add that my journalist’s instincts have led me to ask questions, sometimes a few too many – or the wrong kinds – and that would get me into trouble. Fortunately, I have curtailed that tendency in recent years.

Which brings me to what I wanted to weigh in on here, which was coverage of annuities by The Wall Street Journal earlier this month. I thought one article tended to raise as many questions as it answered.

This is not to put undue criticism on the reporter because after all, I was in her shoes. She must cover much more than just annuities, and no doubt turn her copy over quickly, to editors whose prickly ways are legendary. Moreover, it seems that the length of Journal pieces is much shorter than ones I’ve read in years past, so space is limited.

That’s the rub though: if the Journal, and other periodicals, are opting to publish articles that are short, tight and readable in a short time span (such that the suggested reading time is just a few minutes, as shown in a browser or a smart phone screen), there’s a chance for complex products like annuities to get the short end of the stick.

This is at a time when annuities are at their most complex. Just think of some RILA features being sold right now. Does anyone want to take a stab at explaining those to the average person? Be my guest.

What do I mean when I say the piece (the first of two about annuities and private equity) had some unanswered questions? For one thing, it led with the tale of a woman who purchased an indexed annuity whose return “by the time the policy ended in late 2023,” had accrued an annual return of 3.7%. That was paltry compared to the 13% return of the S&P 500 over the same period, the article said.

Well and good. Now I’m not going to defend the product in question per se, but rather point out aspects of the coverage which could have been fleshed out, so that readers got a better idea of what was purchased.

The piece mentions, in passing, that the buyer paid for “add-ons” that would enable her to “parcel out payments over her lifetime or to her heirs” which she never exercised, and that those add-ons reduced her annualized return by two percentage points. Well, that apparently was a GLWB/death benefit combination, so…what were the details? Did the income rider have a base rollup? What was the benefit base? What was the GAWA percentage? How about the dollar amount of guaranteed annual lifetime income? Those things were never covered.

Then there was a section saying the contract started with 60% of account value allocated to an S&P 500 strategy featuring a 2.9% spread. In year seven the insurer reduced the owner’s S&P allocation to 55%, then to 45% in year 11. There was no mention of why this was done (at first, I wondered if this section referred to the index participation rate, but such was not the case). I suspect the reductions were associated with allocation restrictions tied to the lifetime withdrawal benefit but I’m not positive. If so, that would have been useful information for readers.

There’s also quick mention of an indexed annuity from another carrier, whose educational materials gave rosy hypothetical returns over a 21-year span, based on a “stock-and-crypto index established just last year.” Those hypotheticals were based on back-tested returns, the article said. Now I am not the biggest fan of back testing, but to be fair to the annuity, it has a total of six indexed options, not just the crypto one. That could have been mentioned.

Okay here I will lay my nitpicking pencil down. I do realize the article I dissected intended to shine light on the influence private equity has had, in recent years, on the annuity business – and that fact was delved into further in a follow-up article – which made the space available to expound on annuity features limited.

But the bottom line is that given how the annuity business has evolved in recent years – to sophisticated strategies and features and a plethora of options in nearly every contract – there is a greater chance for media outlets to oversimplify things. What’s the solution? I’m not sure; I’m just, well…raising the question, if you will.