Newspaper? What's a "Newspaper"?

It's the end of an era...

I teach finance courses, and my very favorite is MBA 540, a graduate course entitled "Maximizing Shareholder Wealth".

Traditionally, I offer a fun optional assignment in the first session: What's the highest priced, single share of stock available on the New York Stock Exchange?

I'll tell the students to look over the stock tables in the daily newspaper, perhaps over a cup of coffee in the morning, and one obvious candidate will pop out (Hint: it's Warren Buffett's company).

And an occasional student will say, "I could do that on the Internet, couldn't I?" Sure, I say, but the newspaper lists all the companies on the New York Stock Exchange in one compact list.

As a matter of fact, I started a new course just last week, and gave out this very assignment to my current students.

But, unknown to me, that will be the very last time.

You see, our local paper, the St Petersburg Times, just announced today that they are re-organizing the newspaper, and will stop publishing daily stock listings for most companies as of Monday, May 19 (coincidentally, the anniversary of the day that I graduated from college myself).

The paper now directs readers to look up stock prices online.

Which is a shame... and obviously, the end of an era.

Newspapers have always been a daily part of my life. One of my first memories is reading the comics spread out on the floor on Sunday morning after church.

Although neither of my parents graduated from high school (one not even from the eighth grade), there were always newspapers around our home. We had the morning paper (the New York Daily News... New York's Picture Newspaper!), and two afternoon papers, the Staten Island Advance, with neighborhood news and the New York Journal American, primarily to get the closing day's stock prices. Sometimes, my parents subscribed to the Wall Street Journal, and always we had the 'bigger than life' New York Times, with its multitudinous array of separate news sections, including a glossy magazine and book review, on Sundays. In the summer, I used to take the Sunday Times along when I went fishing. Friends and family used to get a kick out of that!

To me, getting a stock price always meant looking it up in the newspaper. I even continued to show students, right up to the present day, a graphic about "How to Read Stock Tables in the Newspaper".

All that will, of course, end on Monday, May 19, 2008.

Of course, I expect that I will make a mental slip now and then in the future directing students to look up a stock price in the newspaper.

"What's a newspaper?" they may ask.

For that matter, as I've cover before in this blog, they also may well ask "What's the New York Stock Exchange?"

Progress? I'm really not sure about that.