Winston-Salem paper drops weekly markets section

Carl Crothers, the executive editor of the Winston-Salem News Journal, writes Monday that the paper has stopped printing its weekly Market Review section.

Crothers writes, “The weekly Market Review stock section, which was free to subscribers who requested it, has been discontinued. The number of readers of the section had dwindled to fewer than 2,000, which made it financially unfeasible to print and distribute. We have beefed up the financial pages on journalnow.com as a result. Go to News and click on Business.

“The challenges facing the newspaper industry are well known. And since we are in the business of telling the truth, and you count on us for that, here is the truth. Newspapers are in the midst of a perfect storm, to use an overused cliché. The decline in the national economy, and with it the drop-off in advertising revenue, especially classified advertising revenue, has hit the industry hard. Even before the recent crisis in the markets, changing trends in advertising, particularly the growth of commerce on the Internet, had caused us to trim costs while we adjust to the digital age.”

Read more here.