One of my favorite examples of things newspapers do that baffles me is to print the stock tables every day. While I imagine there are a small number of people that continue to read these over the breakfast table, I can’t imagine the cost/benefit analysis of providing these in every local newspaper is worth it.
Recently, there’s been a trend of newspapers deciding to dump the stock tables. Hint – there’s this thing called the Internet – you can get real time quotes for free all day long.
I talked to editors at two of the three local Denver/Boulder papers today and found out that The Denver Post and the Rocky Mountain News stopped publishing stock tables within the past two weeks and the Boulder Daily Camera is in the process of doing this also. Of course, I didn’t notice this because I read the newspapers online (via RSS and the web).
Oh well – I guess there’s one less thing that I can use to kick the local papers around about.