Consider Consolidation of Stock Pages

By William Donnellon
October 18, 2004 03:23 PM

As the newspaper industry's frenzy to provide new content collides with its reluctance to use more newsprint, something's got to give. These days, for more and more papers, it's the stock pages.

When I became business editor of The Record in March last year, the train was already on the tracks. We were going to cut our stock space from two and a half pages to one page. We'd replace the stocks with lots more local business news, personal finance stories and a local stock index that would track the regional economy.

The move made sense.

With a productive staff of eight and tons of news to cover, we needed more space. Every survey out there, it seemed, told us readers wanted more personal finance news and information. And more and more people were getting quicker, more up-to-date stock information over the Internet.

We began redesigning the section, working over the summer and into the fall. We went from a section front, a jump page and stocks, to a section front, a half page of personal finance every day from Tuesday to Friday, an open page for North Jersey business news, jump space and one page of stocks.

I worked with the Associated Press to whittle the stocks down to a page, consolidating New York Stock Exchange, American Stock Exchange and NASDAQ listings to a third of a page, a third of a page for mutual funds and a third for sector breakouts, diary information, etc. We also established The Record 70, a list of local companies we follow closely, and an index set up for us by Bloomberg.

For the North Jersey page, we added local briefs, The Record 70 listing, more features and Q&As about local companies.

We were hitting personal finance hard. We planned to kick off the revamped section with a two-part series on 401(k) plans. Our personal finance writer, Kathleen Lynn, would write a weekly column.

The prototype pages looked terrific. We had two weeks of local stories planned out for the new local page. We were ready to go. It was exciting.

With a launch date of Tuesday, Jan. 6, I wrote a column for the previous Sunday telling readers about the changes, including the reduction in stock listings. There wasn't much of a reaction. We anticipated that we'd get complaints, especially from our older readers. But we thought we'd be ready.

Not quite.

If ever a phone was ringing off the hook, it was mine on Tuesday morning. My voicemail was full. As quickly as I cleared a message, a new one would arrive. That would go on for a week.

That first day, we got hundreds of calls. In the first two weeks, I handled about 200 calls myself. No, they weren't calling to tell us how much they liked the new pages and features we had worked so hard to produce. They were telling us we had "ruined" the business section.

I spoke to residents of a local senior citizen center, who told me of their morning ritual of gathering in the community room with their Records, and reviewing their portfolios. And retired couples who began their days with coffee and The Record, turning first to the stocks pages to review their holdings. There was deep emotion in their voices. We hadn't just changed the section. We had taken something enjoyable from their day.

These weren't traders. These were mostly older, long-time readers, 30-, 40-, 50-year subscribers who either didn't have a computer or preferred looking up their stocks and funds everyday in the paper. Hardly the target of newspaper efforts to attract younger, more diverse readers but for many papers, still their core.

One caller summed things up: "What were you thinking?"

Some were angry, others puzzled and still others hurt. Painful as it was, I enjoyed many of the conversations. These were real readers telling me how important The Record was to them, and how we had let them down. A number of them threatened to cancel the paper, but few apparently did. Others understood, sort of, and even took the news with good humor.

We must have received more than a thousand calls. Looking on the bright side, that's 179,000 readers who didn't call to complain. A few actually said they liked the new section.

We had an ace in the hole that helped. A few years ago, when we all but eliminated Sunday stocks, we began publishing a comprehensive 12-page Sunday stock supplement that was free to any subscribers who wanted it. Many of the callers weren't aware of it, were happy to hear about it and ordered it on the spot.

We learned some lessons. Among them: As much as you think you know about what your readers value, you won't really know until you take it away from them. And as you worry about how to attract the young and diverse, you can't forget about the long-time readers who have made your newspaper an important part of their lives.

If you're planning to trim your stock section, here are some other things to keep in mind:

Know your demographics. The older and more affluent your readership, the more complaints you're likely to get. They may not know Yahoo from Yoo-hoo, but they know what they want. And it's doubtful they'll be satisfied by an alternative, such as looking up stocks on your Web site or calling a toll-free phone number.

Get everyone on the same page. Make sure the key contacts for reader complaints or questions -- the clerk's desk, the circulation department -- know what's happening and are prepared to handle it. Prepare a basic response and communicate it to the front lines.

If you can, avoid a drastic change. Trimming back the space for stocks slowly makes it more palatable, and easier to handle requests that certain stocks be put back in the listings.

Don't plan on getting any other work done that first day.

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Copyright © 2008 Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism