Thursday, March 02, 2006
Putting stock in on-line newspapers
Some newspaper publishers are ripping space-intensive financial market data out of their print editions and exiling it to their websites ("Newspapers Weigh Cutting Stock Pages," The Washington Post, 2 March 2006, page D03). John Temple of the Rocky Mountain News in Denver notes that:
Investors ... are mostly higher-income people who probably have Internet connections at home and want up-to-the-minute stock prices rather than the day-old figures a newspaper provides.
He also says, "'Frankly, it's had almost no measurable impact on our circulation.'" Maybe that's because the same people who check the markets every day and have the means to do so on-line ditched newspapers as their source for this information long ago. You can get stock prices from the Rocky Mountain News or Washington Post e-versions instead of their hard-copy counterparts, but you can also set up a profile at Bloomberg.com or many sites offering similar services and get an up-to-the-minute read on your personal portfolio whenever you want. I haven't checked a stock price in the paper, of either the physical or virtual variety, in years.
