North Carolina paper ME explains biz coverage changes

TALKING BIZ NEWS EXCLUSIVE

Carol Hanner, the managing editor of the Winston-Salem Journal in North Carolina, explained to Talking Biz News the recent changes made to its business coverage, including an expanded Sunday business section.

“Our new Sunday business section has added a local Q&A or business profile in addition to the Sunday cover story and secondary story we normally do, a column by a local consultant on job searching skills and techniques and a personal finance column by syndicated writer Scott Burns,” said Hanner.

“We also created a full daily business page (except Monday) as a second A-section cover to highlight local business coverage more.

“Previously, we had a half page of business inside the A-section, with the other half being daily stock listings. We eliminated those, on the premise that they had been so reduced that they weren’t totally useful and most people who monitor stocks daily aren’t looking to the newspaper for that.

“We got a lot of complaints, primarily from older readers who don’t have computers or don’t like using their computers, and they don’t really use the paper for trading, but they just liked looking at them. We do have stock listings on Sunday, so many subscribers accepted that, although they would prefer to have them daily.

“We also stopped publishing two Wall Street Journal pages in Sunday business, purely because of the cost, especially the news print. That was a tough decision but our options financially would have been to cut another reporter, so I opted for focusing on local coverage first. That didn’t generate the opposition that daily stock listings removal did.”