When footnotes are the content

I received an M&A report the other day that was looking at the IT consulting industry.  The 68-page report was nicely formatted with charts and graphs and some commentary regarding the trends in the industry broken down by size of company.  Nothing out of the unusual until I hit page 10.  Page 10 to 68 were the footnotes.  That's right, 58 pages of paragraph long footnotes.  So where is the real story, in the upfront analysis or the footnotes?

I've seen this type of trend in corporate annual reports as well.  You might as well skip the summary and head to the footnotes for the real meat.  Companies use the summaries more and more as a marketing piece for their shareholders with nice fluff statements and then hide the meat in the footnotes.

In this world where every statement needs to be qualified in order to not offend, insult, or skew the facts, I'm beginning to realize that I should read the footnotes first, then read the summary.  It's an interesting approach to consuming content in context.