Stock Table Troubles
"When you go from a single-character fraction to cents, you're adding a minimum of two characters to each stock number."
by Carol Memmott
The New York Stock Exchange plans to begin trading in decimals by January 2000, a step that will make stock reports more accurate but could cause some headaches for the nation's newspapers.
"Decimals will be a key step toward a more global NYSE and prices more easily understood by individual investors than ever-smaller fractions," said NYSE chairman and chief executive Richard A. Grasso when the plan to move to decimals was announced earlier this year.
Today, stock quotes are reported in fractions. The NYSE changed the standard increment to 1/16 from 1/8 as an interim move last summer. That had no impact on newspapers, because single-character fractions are used in most newspaper stock reports.
But the move to decimals has the potential to use up more newsprint, an intimidating thought as many papers move toward decreasing their web widths and rethinking their use of valuable news space.
"Newspapers have come up with a fixed amount of real estate they are willing to provide for financial news," says John Iobst, NAA's director of advanced computer science. "When you go from a single-character fraction to cents, you're adding a minimum of two characters to each stock number."
The Wall Street Journal, for example, currently reports seven different numbers with each stock price. When the change to decimals is complete, assuming the addition of only two extra characters, an additional 14 characters will be added to each stock's report. It's a drastic change, says Iobst, "that's not going to happen."
A number of papers have already cut back their stock tables. The Star Tribune of Minneapolis' Saturday paper reports on 5,500 stocks, but weekday coverage is limited to 1,600 stock prices, set in agate, filling one page. The 1,600 include stocks of local interest plus most of the stocks in the S&P 500.
Bruce Adomeit, the Star Tribune's news technology coordinator, says his paper can continue reporting on the same number of stocks after the switch to decimals--with some limitations. Pointing out that 1/16 converts to .0625, he says, "We can handle two digits after the decimal point, but we can't handle four."
But just how many numbers the stock exchange plans to place to the right of the decimal point remains to be seen. "We haven't gotten that far yet," says NYSE spokesperson Jennifer Genco.
Like many papers, the Star Tribune offers readers electronic stock quotes. Its free audiotex service logged 327,000 calls in September, but Adomeit says it's too soon to predict whether electronic quotes are enough to satisfy readers. "At some point, when more of our readers get used to using this, maybe we could make the final bite. But that is something we want to decide based on the wishes of our readers, not because technology forced us."
While newspapers wrestle with space limitations, newspaper system vendors and wire services say the move will pose few challenges.
Frank Pazoureck of System Integrators Inc. says newspapers should be able to manage by "skinnying up" type width, although readability could be compromised. "If they use 6-point type, which they typically do, and you've altered the set-width to skinny it up, some readers will probably complain, 'I can't read that very well.' But it should typeset correctly."
At The Associated Press, Vice President and Director of Communications and Technology John Reid says the switch will not affect wire services in a big way. "We'll have to change our systems to count in tenths instead of eighths. We do a lot of paginated stock services for newspapers, so it'll just affect the typesetting. So much of the stock pages now are done by templates we lay out for papers that we'll probably have to adjust columns and that type of thing. It's the font idiosyncrasies that will have to be worked out."
Carol Memmott is a free-lance writer based in Chantilly, Va. E-mail, Cmemmott@aol.com; phone, (703) 802-6558.