• OCRegister.com, Tuesday, January 22, 2008 2 PM

The Orange County Register newspaper will move most business news into the main at the end of the month, one of its responses to challenges faced by traditional print media in an increasingly digital age, i.e. declining circulation, the loss of advertising dollars and high newsprint costs, among others.

"Shifting our business coverage into news is driven by a need to be more efficient in the type of news we publish in our newspaper versus online," says Terry Horne, publisher. Business news will now appear inside the main section Monday through Saturday, while daily listings of stock and mutual fund prices will pretty much disappear. But a stand-alone business section will still run on Sundays.

The newspaper had daily circ of 284,613 as of Sept. 30 and will be the largest U.S. newspaper yet to eliminate its business section, notes Chris Roush, a University of North Carolina journalism professor. "Eventually, readers get used to a new location," he says. "But the non-verbal impression the newspaper is giving is that business news is not as important as it once was."

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