Subscriber Benefit
As a subscriber you can listen to articles at work, in the car, or while you work out. Subscribe Now
Monday was my first day back in the office after a breathtaking trip with my husband to the Oregon coast to see the Pacific Ocean and to northern California to appreciate the redwood forests. If you haven’t seen either, I recommend the trip highly.
The views of Oregon’s rugged coastline are spectacular, and the giant redwoods are truly awe-inspiring. We took a side trip to Crater Lake (gorgeous), walked through the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at the University of Oregon (inspirational) and visited with family in Springfield (relaxing).
As fantastic as the trip was, I’m always happy to get home. Still, it’s a little nerve-racking to walk into the office after a week away. Fortunately, the first thing I saw on my desk was a delightful note from a young reader with a special request.
Zeke H. Dick is a third-grader who lives in Indianapolis. “I love reading your journals,” he wrote, “and I was thinking, what if you put a single comic strip” in the paper.
He suggested Calvin and Hobbes, the strip by Bill Watterson that launched in 1985 and follows the adventures of 6-year-old Calvin and his tiger sidekick. “Consider the 7th page,” added Zeke, whose dad works at Merchants Capital and gave me permission to use his son’s name.
Zeke reckons that adding a comic “could get more readers” for IBJ. I’m going to take the idea to IBJ owner and Publisher Nate Feltman.
Thanks to Zeke, who took the time to write to IBJ. I invite all IBJ readers—those who are in elementary school and those of you who might be a bit older—to send us their suggestions.
In particular, I’d love to hear your thoughts about IBJ’s decision to stop publishing a list of Indiana stocks and their share prices.
Since we stopped printing the list midsummer, I’ve heard from two readers—one who told me IBJ had committed a “cardinal sin” and another who said he enjoyed the list and hoped it would return.
The decision to stop printing the stocks list wasn’t arbitrary but neither was it especially well reasoned. It was forced somewhat by circumstance and influenced by what we perceived as a lack of enthusiasm about the feature.
First, the circumstances. For years, IBJ received most of the information we used for the stock page from the Associated Press and Bloomberg. The AP provided the list of stocks and associated information, which we’d augment with a few additional local companies. Bloomberg provided the Indiana Index, which was—as you might expect—an index that represented all Indiana-based companies.
Unfortunately, Bloomberg retired the index early this year. Then the AP changed our access to the stocks so that we couldn’t download and present them in the same way we had been doing. These changes meant we needed to consider a rethinking of the page overall.
All of this occurred at the same time we were more often facing earlier deadlines due to special sections, advertising wraps and mail holidays, which meant the stock prices we put in the paper were sometimes a week old.
At the same time, we reasoned most readers probably were getting their stocks information from the internet. So we decided to eliminate the page.
That decision doesn’t need to be final. Please let me know what you think. And if you’d like a stock page to return, help us determine what it should include. Email me at [email protected] with “stocks” in the subject line.•
__________
Weidenbener is editor of IBJ and assistant publisher of IBJ and The Indiana Lawyer.
Please enable JavaScript to view this content.
