Friday, January 13, 2006

Here's a serious question: Is there a stock-market investor left anywhere who relies on print-edition newspaper stock tables for his/her daily fix of stock price information?

OK. There may be three. Somewhere. Two of them are probably reading the stock tables in the Wall Street Journal, and the other one perhaps in the New York Times or the Financial Times.

Everyone else? Online, of course. Or on their mobile phones, PDAs, Blackberries, Blueberries, or Whateverberries. So why do newspapers that aren't the Journal or the Times persist in running stock tables? Out of habit, nothing more.

The Chicago Tribune has become the latest paper to announce that it will drastically cut the space it devotes to stock prices. Good move. Eliminating one page of stock listings a day probably leads to savings of a couple of million bucks annually. Cutting more than two pages? Perhaps a saving of, say, $5 million a year -- and another million or two if newsprint prices keep rising, as expected.

It'd be great if they put just $3 million of that back into the corporate pocket (disclosure: I own Tribune Co. stock) and devote the rest to maintaining reportorial staff and newshole elsewhere, preferably in the local section.

The reasons for cutting print stock tables are obvious. "Much of the detailed daily information on stocks will be available on chicagotribune.com, where readers can get a much wider and more complete range of information," according to associate managing editor for business Jim Kirk. Also, "The more widespread use of the Internet for this type of information and the rise of global trading ... has limited the utility of quotes published in the newspaper." And the paper was up-front about the savings in newsprint costs. It also said it would provide a toll-free telephone stock listing service.

This is a trend that should continue. Don't be surprised if next year at this time, the only daily papers carrying extensive stock tables are the aforementioned WSJ, NYT, and FT. That would be a step forward in rationalizing newspaper products, and getting away from the "we've always done it this way" mentality that still rules at so many newspapers.
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