Friday, January 16, 2009

Whine, whine, whine

C: You need to expand the business section and have at least a weekly listing of ALL stocks and mutual funds. - G.M.

A: Hey, Rip VanWinkle, wake up! Sometime after you fell asleep, way back in the mid 1990s, we dropped our Sunday stock listings of complete NYSE and mutual-fund transactions. I think I can count the complaints we've received about that on my toes, the reason being that this information is old and useless to almost all investors.
Criminy! Even the Wall Street Journal stopped publishing complete listings.

We do publish daily quotations, including the top 500 NYSE stocks; that's much more than the Post-Gazette does daily. The P-G still published 6 pages of stock agate on Sundays, however, which is a phenomenal waste of newsprint.

In order to survive, newspapers must do what they do best and give up the things – like printed stock transactions – that the Internet does much better. We do offer our readers complete stock and mutual-fund information on our Web site, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

5 comments:

Ellipses said...

You should bring back the magic eye thing you used to have on the back of the A section in place of the hot shot... I was never able to see the "thing"... but I sure did like trying :-)

LoL... and if you don't do it, I'm going to cancel my subscription!

I'm kidding, of course... I don't get a hard copy paper

Anonymous said...

A more valid complaint would be the O-R's complete lack of coverage of the 100th anniversary of the Marianna Mine Disaster. With 154 fatalities in November 1908, you guys completely dropped the ball. Not even so much as an article to mark the event. But for some reason you had plenty of articles on the Donora Smog of 1948. I see Scott Berveridge even managed to get a spot in one of the several documentaries that appeared on television. But not even so much as a blurb on the Marianna explosion? Inexcusable.

Dismayed O-R Reader

Park Burroughs said...

One hundred years ago, mine disasters were shockingly common, and the one at Marianna was one of the worst. Sadly, these events slip out of public consciousness when there is no one left to remember them.

We did not completely drop the ball, however. The Marianna disaster was chosen by us as the top local story of the half century (1908-1957) in our 200th anniversary edition of Aug. 17.

Maybe a better question is: Why didn't anyone in Marianna or the UMWA bother to commemorate the date?

Anonymous said...

I agree that there are much better ways to get stock quotes than a newspaper. What would really be neat is if you would include at least one local business story in every business section.

Anonymous said...

To your credit, the coverage of the Robena Disaster in 1962 was excellent. But if the Heinz History Center could do an entire exhibit on mine disasters from December 1907, surely a Washington County paper could have devoted more attention to the Marianna disaster. Can you name a single event that claimed more lives in Washington County? That alone makes it significant. But your point on the UMWA's lack of attention is a good one.

Slightly-Less-Dismayed O-R Reader