We’re all looking for good news. Every vendor and retail I speak to asks me to report something positive. If you’ve got some good news, I tell them, I would love to report it. But most have news that is merely hopeful if it isn’t downright bad. Not that hopeful news isn’t a hopeful sign.

The prevailing attitude in retail seems to be that consumers are scared and over-reacting. That they’d shop if someone told them it was okay to shop, and that someone, retailers say, must be the media.

It looks like the media is trying its best to oblige, as I’ve seen a flurry of “recovery” stories the last couple of weeks.

Target CEO Gregg Steinhafel spoke to Minnesota Public Radio, and he sounded very hopeful:

“The encouraging signs would be, things like stability. There’s stability in the marketplace, stability in terms of our same-store sales performances, and there are some businesses that have been underperforming that are starting to perform better. So those are some of the encouraging signs where your underlying trend gets better. So as Mike said yesterday these are stressful times, there’s a lot of anxiety among consumers based on job loss and high unemployment rates. This is not a V-shaped recovery. I subscribe to his commentary about how it’s more of a U-shaped recovery—it’s going to take some time.”

He says he sees a pick up in non-discretionary categories like food and health & beauty. He’s also seeing fewer delinquencies in Target’s credit card business. And apparel and other discretionary categories? “Those discretionary categories continue to be under the most pressure. Home and apparel and most higher-ticket items are deferrable.”

The Mike that Steinhafel refers to could have been Businessweek’s chief economist Mike Mandel, who was interviewed with Fortune’s Katie Benner on April 10 on National Public Radio’s Marketplace. Mandel and Marketplace host Kai Ryssdal talked a bit about the shape of recovery we’re in for—will it be V-shaped, “where it gets to a point and then bounces up nicely” or an L-shape, a U-shape or a W-shape.

Fortune’s Katie Benner thinks we’ll see a W:

“I was talking to a couple of different economists and then investors like George Soros out there, who also see a W. And their reasoning is that we've had to pump so much money into the economy—so much just to keep it on life support and to keep it going, and then to improve it—that eventually that money is going to have to be yanked out very, very quickly in order to prevent hyper-inflation or even just inflation. And when that happens it will put the brakes on the economy again. And so we'll see a dip before we go back up, and I think that's an interesting argument for the W.”

Advertising Age has a nice big article this week in which they ask agency heads if they think we’re near the bottom yet. Doug Spong, the president of Carmichael Lynch said that optimistically, we’ll “make it out of the economic shadows sometime in fourth quarter 2009.” That’s what I’ve been hearing most among apparel vendors and retailers.

Maurice Levy, the CEO of media giant Publicis Groupe, says that while cost-cutting is still the rule, come of his clients are starting to prepare for the upturn.

So while the news may not be great right now, it is hopeful.