At their best, stock market reports were things of beauty. A home, not just for prices, but for jokes and stories and hints of inside information, all acquired by a skilled, experienced hack who knows the City inside out.

Those hacks tended to be expensive and not all business editors saw their value.

As costs got squeezed, the market report was shifted down the pecking order, quite often to the most junior person in the office, who was told to learn about shares for a few months before they moved on to a “proper” beat.

Since no one had done it like it can be done for so long, editors forgot, or perhaps had never seen, what they could be.

As market reports got downgraded, they became less relevant. Since we all know what the market did today, what’s the point of a piece repeating that in a paper tomorrow?

The Times has just decided to dramatically slim down its market report and do away with the idea of having a dedicated correspondent.

This isn’t that surprising, but it’s still a shame.

It is also a loss of intelligence going into newspapers and, less significantly, out of them via flaks to the corporate world.

It is one way fewer for hacks and flaks to interact in a mutual back-scratching way, one that built trust for the future.

(Or that allowed flaks to lie outrageously to fend off a true rumour for one more day. Don’t tell me this never happened.)

Doing the market report was a way to meet brokers and bankers, the people who oiled the wheels of trading every day, as well as PR people.

The brokers and the PRs might see the market report as a way to pump up clients.

And the clever hack would play ball, in return for actual interesting information about something else, something no one knew about.

The best market reports always had a slot for small cap companies. These were under reported then and are totally ignored now in ways that can hardly help growing companies attract investors.

The best market reporters in their day – I’m going for Gary Parkinson at The Times and Paul Murphy at The Guardian – more than just understood their topic.

They were mischievous about it. A half-informed reader might get more information, more entertainment, from the market report than from anything else.

Decent market reporters were also the early warning system for the wider business desks, bringing in leads that sector specialists could then chase and convert into stories. 

The market was the most fun City beat to work bar none. Full of the personalities, the chancers, that made London fun as well as somewhere to make money. 

That’s all gone, and both hack and flak land are poorer for it.

Bloomberg still does markets thoroughly, of course. But it is written for fellow market participants, not for the small investor.

They will have to get their market information elsewhere from now on.

Perhaps The Telegraph will spot what The Times has done, notice a gap, and decide to invest in proper market coverage.

I wouldn’t bet on it.

Please send candidates for press release of the day to: Simon.english@roxhillmedia.com