Does NYT’s DealBook mean print readers get less?

New York Times ombudsman Arthur Brisbane writes Sunday about the paper’s DealBook site, which covers Wall Street but only gets a half page in the printed paper.

Brisbane writes, “The Times’s DealBook expansion is a strategy for capturing digital readers interested in this narrowly defined perspective. Larry Ingrassia, the Business Day editor, told me that while in print The Times can succeed by broadly addressing ‘the five or 10 most important things you need to know,’ the Web demands narrower and deeper offerings.

“‘If we don’t provide readers with some specialized content that informs them in an area where they might have a narrower and high interest,’ he said, ‘somebody else is going to do it.’

“The Times sacrificed no existing resources when it decided to enlarge DealBook, Mr. Ingrassia emphasized. Granting that, I worry that the investment meant forgoing an opportunity to strengthen reporting elsewhere.

“One area in need now, in the business news category, is clearly the deepening hole in Europe. In slow motion, the weaker states of the European Union are sliding toward insolvency and the European banks, which hold their debt, are being pulled along.”

Read more here.