RIP stand-alone business section

Elinore Longobardi of the Columbia Journalism Review writes Thursday about the death of the standalone business section and concludes that the papers that have cut are the ones that had thin business news coverage.

Longobardi writes, “The phenomenon has otherwise not gotten the coverage it merits.

“That’s too bad, because who else but local business reporters and editors are going to report on the ups and downs of the local economies and the goings-on of the small-to-medium-sized businesses that have huge impacts on individual communities but never grace the pages of The Wall Street Journal? In some cases, local business weeklies have sprung up to fill a void, but those too often have the interests of business in mind, not those of the community at large. That’s a role general-interest publications have typically had to fill.

“We compiled a list (above) of a dozen or so stand-alone business sections that have gotten the axe—along with a few that have absorbed lesser hits—and set about finding how local business editors were dealing with the situation.

“The answer? Not very well.”

Read more here.