LA Times and Chicago Trib considering cutting stock listings
The story was in the Wall Street Journal this morning. You can read it here.
This does not surprise me. Many newspapers have cut their stock listings in the past few years, and some papers only run the stocks that are widely held in their area. But the big metropolitan papers have always run a complete stock price listing. It’s been one of the backbones of the business sections in these cities.
I fear that cutting the stock listings means a smaller news hole for many business sections, which means fewer stories and fewer business reporters. And that can not be a good thing for us.
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What this more immediately threatens to do in many shops is to end the standalone business section altogether and revisit the bad old days of being stuck behind metro or sports. As newspapers do away more and more with anything considered a “specialty section,” we need to be ready to arm ourselves with readership facts and new strategies to prevent the beancounters from ordering pages taken out what are now increasingly 6-page daily sections.