IR Alert article “Is Your Online Annual Report Up to Snuff? New 2009 Online Annual Report (OAR) Report Highlights Trends, Best Practices for IROs” features “The 2009 Online Annual Report (OAR) Report” by Nina Eisenman & Elaine Palmer.

From the article…

This was a pivotal year for online annual reports.

Gone are the days of thick annual reports chock full of photos and traditional, typeset financial sections. Producing, printing and mailing hard-copy annual reports is expensive and time consuming. In an effort to manage costs and meet accelerated filing deadlines, companies have scaled back their printed annual reports to a point where the majority of 2007 and 2008 annual reports were slim 10-K wraps. A confluence of factors including cost saving initiatives, compressed filing deadlines and a general trend towards ubiquitous Internet use has fueled a move from hard copy to online distribution of annual reports. The final game changer, however, was the SEC’s Notice and Access.

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