Categories: OLD Media Moves

NY paper cutting Sunday WSJ content for its own

Rex Smith, the editor of the Albany Times Union in New York, writes about the paper’s changed to its Sunday business section.

Smith writes, “You’ll notice the changes most if you have been a fan of the Sunday Wall Street Journal pages that we have published in our Business section for the past five years. Those pages, focusing on personal finance advice, are being replaced with a new Sunday Money page that we think will offer readers useful content in much less space and at considerably reduced expense.

“It’s not that we didn’t like the Journal pages. But in an era of diminished revenues, editors must choose where to spend a limited pool of dollars. Those pages cost us the equivalent of a full-time reporter’s pay and benefits. Local reporting is really what you expect the Times Union to deliver to you, and we promise to deliver it to you at a level of depth and quality that you won’t find elsewhere.

“With that as our goal, I can’t in good conscience sacrifice a local job and the unique reporting it can yield to preserve personal finance content similar to what you can find in so many other places.

“Because of production realities on our 41-year-old press, we have to shrink another section to match the newly configured Business section. Thus, our Perspective section will lose a half-page of content, while more than a page of advertising will move elsewhere in the paper.”

Read more here.

Chris Roush

Chris Roush was the dean of the School of Communications at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut. He was previously Walter E. Hussman Sr. Distinguished Professor in business journalism at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is a former business journalist for Bloomberg News, Businessweek, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Tampa Tribune and the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. He is the author of the leading business reporting textbook "Show me the Money: Writing Business and Economics Stories for Mass Communication" and "Thinking Things Over," a biography of former Wall Street Journal editor Vermont Royster.