The Death of the Stand-Alone Business Section

The Columbia Journalism Review looks at the disappearance of stand-alone business sections in newspapers. Here’s a look at some recent departures:

I’ve spend most of my life reading the Washington Post, and from what I recall, the daily business section was simply attached on to the end of the sports section. I think that’s how I first got interest in following stocks. It’s not that big a jump from box scores to stock tables.
I don’t see any reason to get nostalgic about stand-alone sections. The amount of business is overflowing. Without pornography and stock quotes, I doubt the Internet would ever have gotten off the ground. CNBC, the Wall Street Journal and a zillion other sites cover business pretty thoroughly. My major quibble isn’t the amount of news, it’s that the news is often not in proper context, and that’s where blogs can play a key role.
I do reserve the right to get nostalgic about reading the stock tables in the daily paper. You had to scroll through hundreds off quotes to find out how well you did. One of my first roles as a broker was simply giving people live quotes during the day. And then there were those awful factions!
On second thought, maybe I won’t get too nostalgic.

Posted by Eddy Elfenbein on April 9th, 2008 at 10:21 am

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