I Was the Internet Once
January 14, 2006
Via PaidContent.org, I learn that the Chicago Tribune is the lastest major newspaper to stop printing the pages and pages of closing stock and mutual fund prices that have long been a staple of daily newspapers. They will still run the comprehensive tables on Sundays, and the daily papers will tabulate highlights from the day—most active stocks, local stocks, etc.
This probably strikes many people as a no-brainer. I probably last looked up a closing stock price in a newspaper in 1999 or so, and the Web is lush with financial information. But there are certainly some readers who—whether because of age or habit or temperament—still go to their daily newspaper for this kind of information. So I am sure some small percentage of the Tribune’s readers will not be happy with the change.
And this is certainly more evidence of how the game is changing for print newspapers. Boston is now a two-newspaper town, but it had three dailies when I was a kid, and at least two of them had evening editions. Evening editions started disappearing as local television stations began producing more local news, and there are few evening papers anymore (if any?).
My first paying jobs were in newspapers. When I was 12, I started a paper route, and would eventually deliver about 60 newspapers a day to my neighborhood. I made about $15 a week, which was a small fortune in those days. I could buy all my essentials—baseball gloves, hockey equipment, and all the candy bars I could possibly eat. I also began working at a corner drug store, where I would deliver telegrams and prescriptions around the neighborhood. I also had the job of delivering four evening newspapers—one to a shut-in across the street and the others to the three brothers who ran the corner grocery store on the opposite corner. The brothers, I would learn later, were in the stock market, and the evening edition, which came out about 6:00 PM, would somehow—miraculously to my thinking—have the closing stock prices from when the market closed at 4:00.
I was the last link in this amazing information chain—from the markets in New York, to the presses somewhere in downtown Boston, by truck to the corner drugstore just outside Boston, and then into my hands. The driver would throw the bundle of papers from the truck onto the drugstore step. The clerk—a few years older than me and full of secret knowledge—would produce a boxcutter from his pocket and slice the twine from around the papers. I would grab the top four papers and negotiate the busy intersection. There were no walk signals in those days, and the traffic barely paused. At the first break in the traffic I would sprint across the street and through the door of the busy market. The brothers would be around the counter. Charlie, the butcher, in his long bloody apron was always the one to take the papers from me, slipping me a quarter—15 cents for the three newspapers and the remaining dime for me. Before I was back out the door they would have the papers open, scanning the closing prices to see how they had done that day.
Posted by Bill Trippe at January 14, 2006 11:03 AM
