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NEW YORK In what appears to be a first for a major U.S. metro, The Star-Ledger of Newark, N.J., plans to stop running daily stock listings as part of a business-section overhaul that will see it focus more on personal finance and business trends.

Business Editor David Allen said the change, scheduled for Wednesday, will eliminate all four pages of daily stock tables, replacing them with two pages of editorial content on market analysis, corporate news, and other issues. He said the business section usually runs seven or eight pages.

"We think we can provide much more useful information than stock prices," said Allen, who added that the paper would still run stock tables on Sunday. "People are not getting their stock quotes from the newspaper. They get them from online sources."

Allen said the Advance Publications daily will still provide up-to-the-minute stock quotes on its Web site (http://www.nj.com) as well as via a telephone stock hotline. He said the paper hopes to replace stock listings with features such as a national and international business news wrap-up, closer scrutiny of New Jersey companies, and more stories examining trends. "In doing so, we believe we can attract new readers to the section," he said.

Other newspapers have reconfigured, and, in some cases, reduced, stock listings in recent years. Several also have temporarily eliminated stocks during costly newsprint price hikes. But The Star-Ledger is believed to be the first major newspaper to remove weekday stock listings entirely.

Business editors at several other newspapers criticized the idea of removing stock tables, saying they remain a valuable asset for readers, even in the Internet age.

"There is no substitute for being able to look at the portfolio on a page of the paper in the morning," said Dan Miller, business editor at the Chicago Sun-Times. "It is still the defining element of the business section."

Los Angeles Times Business Editor Bill Sing agreed. "Many of the people who are the most Web-savvy are the ones who want it in the paper, because you get it at a glance," he told E&P.

But others, such as Byron Calame, deputy managing editor at The Wall Street Journal and past president of the Society of American Business Editors and Writers, said removing stock listings is not as draconian as it sounds. "Stock quotes, for a lot of dailies, may not be as essential as they once were," he said. "You have not only the Web but other national papers that provide stock listings."

While The Star-Ledger is breaking new ground by removing the listings from its daily business section, it is not the first to alter stock tables. Several papers, including the Austin> (Texas) American-Statesman, have stopped running stock listings in Saturday and Sunday issues, replacing them with a separate weekend stock report available for an additional 25 cents.

"It is information that is of interest to a targeted audience, but not the rest of the audience," said Kathy Warbelow, business editor at the 244,738-Sunday-circulation American-Statesman, which began the weekend stock report in 1994. "About 35,000 readers take it."