Business

<< Previous   of   Next >>   ADVERTISEMENT   CONTACT THE HERALD Mike Benbow, Business Editor benbow@heraldnet.com   Published: Monday, May 12, 2008 What's new in The Herald's business section By Mike Benbow The Business section will look a little different Tuesday. Specifically, it's getting smaller. We're eliminating listings of the New York and Nasdaq stock exchanges on weekdays, reducing what had been a full page of stock market information to a half-page. We'll still keep the listings for Northwest stocks, the biggest mutual funds and all the other market information we have been running each day. And we're adding some more information on commodities, such as what's happening to oil prices. We'll continue to have complete stock listings in our Saturday paper. Bottom line: you'll still be able to check how your stocks are doing in The Herald, just not every day. Why are we doing this? I was going to start off by talking about all the trees we're saving by reducing the amount of paper, but the truth is, we'd like to spend the money in ways that are more useful to larger numbers of people. Newspapers like to write about what's happening to other businesses, but we're terrible at explaining what's happening to our own. So let me talk a little bit about the newspaper industry, which is in what I think is fair to describe as a state of upheaval. With the growing competition from the Internet and other venues for customers and advertisers, newspapers are making less money. In some cases, dramatically less. It's mostly because they're receiving less advertising in their traditional product, the newspaper, and that their own Internet sites aren't filling the gap. Most newspaper Web sites typically produce pennies on the dollar in comparison to the ads they sell in the newspaper. Those changes have been accelerating recently, meaning the bottom has dropped out of the profit picture for most newspapers, prompting major staff cutbacks. The most prominent example in our own back yard was the announcement last month by the Seattle Times that it was eliminating 200 positions through layoffs and attrition and cutting $15 million in its operating budget. It also eliminated its news bureau in Snohomish County and stopped publishing a weekly section of Snohomish County news. Numerous other newspapers have announced similar cutbacks because continuing declines in circulation mean they can't just ride things out and expect everything to be OK. The Herald was fortunate to be among the few newspapers in the country to enjoy recent gains in circulation. Editor & Publisher, an industry journal, listed our 2.37 percent gain as the fifth largest, percentage wise, among U.S. papers with circulations greater than 50,000. The Herald hasn't announced any significant employee cutbacks and isn't planning any layoffs, as far as I know. But we have been looking at what we do and how we do it. And it's hard for us to justify using expensive newsprint to publish stock listings every day. Most newspapers, including the Seattle Times and the Post-Intelligencer, eliminated full stock listings some time ago. We know that some folks like to check their stocks in the paper over a cup of coffee in the morning. But the truth is that most people making urgent buy-and-sell decisions need the more-current information they can get online or through their broker. As I mentioned before, the listings from the major exchanges will continue to be in Saturday's paper. And you can always get updated stock information at Heraldnet.com/financials, a site where you can also form your own portfolio. That's the inside scoop on why things will change a bit on Tuesday. Mike Benbow: 425-339-3459 or benbow@heraldnet.com.

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