Every day, newspapers around the country print page after page of stock price tables and other market data. Not only does that cost a lot of money but it leaves reporters with less space to tell neat stories. Today, The Globe and Mail takes a relatively risky gamble but one, I suspect, that more and more papers are likely to take over the next few years. The Globe will reduce the amount of market data it publishes in its business section by as much as three full pages. Instead, it has beefed up its Internet-based investment tracking and market data tools. As Giles Gherson, editor of the Globe's Report on Business says in today's paper, "In today's fast-moving market, investors need immediate pricing information to make their decisions and that's why, increasingly, they're turning to the Internet, and not the newspaper, to get it."
The Globe has an excellent family of Web sites for business news, market data, and other investor information:

"Our substantial presence on the Internet offers far more financial market data than we could ever publish in a newspaper," Gherson wrote.
"Over the past several months, we've contacted nearly 2,000 of our readers to find out how much they use the pages of stock and financial listings we print. What we learned was what we already suspected: More and more of our readers are now relying on Globeinvestor.com and other websites for up-to-the-minute market price."
This initiative makes particular sense for the Globe as the paper's readership tends to be more affluent and have higher education levels. Those two factors, combined with the fact that more than two-thirds of Canadian households have an Internet connection and greater than 90 per cent of Canadians have Internet access at either home, work or school, makes the likelihood of Globe Report on Business readers having ready access to the Net highly probable.