couple thoughts... saying "what if stock XYZ had been added to the dow" would mean the dow would be at price X is so stupid b/c it's looking backwards and using the benefit of hindsight. what if they used a stock that crashed and burned instead like ENE (enron) for BSC? then the dow would have been at 54.56 according to my calcs lol. second, the dow is the stupidest index in the history of the world. yes i know that doesn't sound very professional but it's a price weighted index of 30 stocks and whenever a stock blows up they just replace it and say "ok now the dow is the best index in the world and is representative of the american economy". third, re barron's, most of the articles are zero valued added and bordering on value subtractive. i don't care what they think about an individual stock b/c i only look at the price. fourth, re abelson, if you can find another person on earth who likes to impress people w/ fancy words more than him i'll immediately wire you a million dollars from my virtual account fifth, newspapers are for dinosaurs (no seriously i was at the bus stop the other day and i saw a t-rex reading a newspaper on the bench). read barron's online if you want for FREE. here's a value added tip to read for free: search for the title of the article in GOOG or just highlight the title and right click and select "search w/ GOOG" or whatever search engine you want and click on the article in the results page. most of the time the article is available for free that saturday. if not, do this the next day or on mon or tues and it's always available by then. don't worry about waiting reading something after the market reopens b/c nothing in barron's is time sensitive.
I had a subscription to the print Barron's until about a year ago. It was delivered by a carrier (i.e. not via USPS). Then one day I got a notice from them that to improve their service they were removing the address label that was on the newspaper. I'm sure it was easier for the carrier to just throw a copy on my drive rather than throw the copy with my label on it. Problem is, they wouldn't know if they forgot to deliver it which happened almost every week after that. Eventually I got fed up and cancelled it. Given their low weekly distribution level (which I recall from the annual statement they have to publish in the paper), I would have thought they would do everything possible to retain subscribers. But I was wrong about that.
I noticed the missing label too, so that's what happened to it ... Delivery issues is a bit of a relief for me actually, the alternative guess was my neighbor was stealing, glad to hear that is probably not the case. Maybe the print format loses money for them, I'm sure having subscribers log in to a site would be cheaper.