Thursday, February 23, 2006

Denver's Rocky Mountain News got a couple hundred complaints recently when it trimmed its printed stock tables down to one page. (You also may have read about this in Romenesko.) Westword's Michael Roberts covered the brouhaha, which resulted in a few dozen subscription cancellations.

Many of the complainers, as you might expect, were older people who've never picked up the Internet habit; some say they don't want to use the Internet and don't like the online world.

So, what's a newspaper to do? I think that the Rocky and other newspapers are making the right decision. It's not a wise economic choice to continue to devote several pages of newsprint to stock tables that are relied on only by a small slice of the paper's readership. As more and more people use the Web for up-to-date stock quotes (instead of printed ones that are half a day or more old), printed stock tables just don't make sense.

I think that newspaper publishers simply need to accept that they're going to have to deal with a small number of unhappy (mostly older) customers. And, importantly, they should offer a phone-in stocks service that the un-wired can use (which can be marketed as an improvement, since phone quotes are timely and print is not). Just don't leave those older customers unserved.

Another factor to consider, of course, is the community. Trimming stock tables from a paper in a big metro market is a no-brainer, but for some small communities, not so much so. (Consider this.)
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