Berkshire Meeting: How the Berkshire Annual Meeting Has Changed

It used to be that all the questions at Berkshire Hathaway's annual shareholder meetings came from the floor, but Warren Buffett added the journalists, and later the analysts, because so few of the audience questions were about Berkshire. In fact, a good portion of them weren't even about investing, or business, or the economy.

After a few years where Mr. Buffett and Charlie Munger got flooded with audience questions about religion, baseball, relationships, and the keys to happiness, they introduced the journalist panel in 2009.

Another, more recent, change: The meeting is to be webcast.

Last year was the first-ever time that Berkshire allowed the proceedings to be broadcast online, and Mr. Buffett reported in his most recent letter to Berkshire shareholders that more than a million people tuned in to at least some portion of the proceedings in real time. More than 10 times that number tuned in to at least a segment of the day's events after the fact.

Attendance was down by about 10% last year, but the early word is that it's back up again in 2017. Roughly 40,000 people are expected. Many of them have squeezed into the CenturyLink Center and the nearby overflow rooms this morning, while some sign up for shareholder passes just for the discounted shopping available at Berkshire-owned businesses like Nebraska Furniture Mart and jeweler Borsheims.

The webcast link is finance.yahoo.com/BRKlivestream.

Click here to see the full live coverage of Warren Buffett at Berkshire Hathaway's annual meeting:

http://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/berkshire-hathaway-2017-annual-meeting-analysis

--Write to Erik Holm at erik.holm@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

May 06, 2017 10:43 ET (14:43 GMT)