Stocks and Finance 2.0
June 5th, 2008 | by Brad King |
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I’m not a big finance guy so I’ve never been keenly attracted to the business pages of a newspaper, but I can see the value in having a strong editorial presence.
In a modern world, it’s important to rethink how newspapers cover business.
I’ve written a bit about what the Business 2.0 section should look like with predictive markets that use their stories (along with aggregation tools to give people comprehensive coverage from other sources) to engage their readers. One of my fondest memories of middle school was the stock market game. I never spent more time reading the business pages than I did then.
But there are more opportunities to make money and engage the readers, I think, particularly as the SEC relaxes its hold on real-time stock quotes.
Here is some news that should interest every financial reporter and editor:
Real-Time Web Quotes
- The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) announced rules that would allow websites to post real-time stock quotes for a fee. Previously, most companies had to wait 15-20 minutes to post results.
- Google then immediately announced that after 17 months of wrangling, Google Finance would begin offering those real-time quotes.
Which Goes Mobile
- The expansion of the mobile Web, thanks to increasingly power processors, will likely lead to an explosion of Web and mobile-based finance applications.
- There are expected to be 830 million handsets with GPS and high-end capabilities shipped by 2012.
- Meanwhile, E-Trade announced it would offer real-time stock quotes and purchase options through the Blackberry, the most prevalent mobile handheld in the United States.
That’s all quite frightening for news organizations because there are about to be a slew of competitors for eyeballs in this market. Writing better stories isn’t going to save the kingdom either. If people have the ability to get information, find real-time quotes and make transactions, local newspapers are going to be hard pressed to find a model that will beat that.
But they have to invest in this type of interactive technology. They need to build predictive markets, invest in the real-time tools, create widgets that allow people to access this information from other sites, use AIR technology to create on and offline applications (because AIR was truly made for this type of financial application).
I would think this type of data structure would also lead to natural partnerships between the paper and financial institutions. I’m not sure how that would work, but I would envision having your real data from your portfolio somehow linked with an account that used this data. It would create a usefulness that would be unparalleled and make the local paper tremendously relevant (and there’s no saying that it would just be local. If a paper in Montana did this, I could still link my data with them).
The point — outside of my half-crazy rambling in that last graf — is that newspaper companies could create digital tools that served their readers while creating the business opportunity for real revenue growth online.
