Business Section Expands

With today’s issue, The Times launches an expanded business section, adding a minimum of 36 columns of editorial content per week and increasing its coverage of personal finance and Southern California business.

The expansion, a reflection of the increasing reader interest in business and economic news, is accompanied by a number of design changes and new features.

The People column will run daily, with more extensive and timely coverage of personnel changes. Business briefs have been redesigned for easier reading. Stories on foreign exchange and commodities markets will be packaged with relevant tables. A business cartoon will run daily, and a calendar of the week’s major business events will appear on Monday.

Your Money, a question-and-answer personal finance column by Debra Whitefield that has appeared in View, will move to Business where it will be called Money Talk.

With the expansion, some columns and other features will move to new days.

The schedule of columns is as follows: Monday, For What It’s Worth and Computer File; Tuesday, Times Board of Economists; Wednesday, Labor; Thursday, Money Talk; Friday, Pacific Rim, and Sunday, John F. Lawrence.

Certain tables will be affected as well. The weekly Money Funds table now will appear on Thursday, rather than the following Monday, so that readers can get information on rates immediately after they are reported. The Key Rates table will continue to appear Saturday but will be placed on Page 2.

The Business section’s front page will incorporate a Markets at a Glance box, a description of the most important stories inside the section and an index to major features and market tables.