Idaho Statesman cuts standalone biz section

The Idaho Statesman is cutting its standalone business section and moving the publishing date of its weekly magazine Business Insider.

Editor Karla Gower writes, “We also took this time to review our daily Business section. We’ve gone back and forth on having a separate section during the recent economic downturn. At one point, we put the content into the Sports section. We didn’t really like that, though, and worked out a way to bring it back as a separate section.

“But we had to print the Business section earlier in the day, and that hasn’t worked well for us — or you. Some of the best business stories arrive after the deadline. Our stocks content barely arrives in time. And it was a real crunch for our presentation folks to edit and design it — and still stay long enough to do the later press run for the other sections.

“So we are going to put our business news into our main news section starting Tuesday. You’ll find it between local/Idaho news and nation/world news. You’ll see your favorite content that you identified in our recent survey: the top business story and the headlines. We’ll still have a half-page of stocks, including local ones and others selected by our readers.

“Because of constraints on the size of sections on our presses, we will move the personal finance information we had on Saturday to the Monday Life section. That includes the popular Dave Ramsey column and the Better Business Bureau scam alerts. Two other popular features, Ed Lotterman’s economics column and Marie McIntyre’s workplace coach column, will move to Business Insider. Our legal ads will move next to our classified ads.”