About a month ago, the newspaper USA Today raised their price to $2. That can’t bode well for their future (not that I would expect newspapers these days to have a rosy outlook). I used to buy a copy about once a week, usually for their decent sports and entertainment sections. But for $2, I won’t be buying it any more.
Are they just giving up and hoping they can make enough money from advertising to the hotel guests that (still) get free copies? Or are they expecting that they will still sell enough that a price of $2 won’t kill them?
Another problem - they have lots of newspaper boxes in cities. When I would buy the paper, I would sometimes have to dig for the necessary 75 cents or $1 in change. I would think that far fewer people will be walking around with $2 in change.
So, are they circling the drain even faster than the typical newspaper?
Funny, I was in the airport last week and I corrected the sale’s girl when she asked for my $2. Needless to say she was right and I couldn’t believe it.
I’ve always been on the opinion that I’d pay $10 a day for the privilage of reading a paper, and if I was ever locked up, that would be my one request. But I have to admit, I’m balking at the $2. I can’t imagine that many folks are going to pony up the sratch for this.
Death spiral if ever there was one. And the death or the newspaper industry means the end of the (quality) news industry. Bad for all of us.
USA Today is part of Gannett group of newspapers. Many of those papers have tried to halt the slide by concentrating on local news on the theory that people got national news from other sources. What that mostly accomplished was papers that seemed thin and forced people to become even more dependent on those other sources. So at about the same time it raised the price of USA Today, Gannett started an experiment in which most of the day’s issue was inserted into some of the local papers it owns. That gave the papers coverage of national topics - not New York Times level, but how many local papers do that? - and added hundreds of thousands of readers that they could tout to advertisers.
I haven’t found any analysis of how well this is doing, and it’s probably too early to tell. I like it. My local paper was nearly worthless before. Nothing will stop the downward trend of newspaper readers, but this might make newspapers viable for a few extra years by solving several problems at once. Even if it winds up being inadequate I’m glad they tried it.
Back in the murky days before the internet was common, I’d look very forward to the free USA Today when I was on business travel. There was always a gigantic stack of them in the lobby and if you weren’t up early enough, you might miss out. (Some hotels would deliver then to the outside of your door). Nowadays they might have five or ten of them on the front desk and hardly anyone wants them. We all just read our smartphones or laptops at breakfast.
Don’t a lot of places (for example, entrances to subway stations) sell newspapers at a discount? Maybe somebody figured that if this was the primary source of income now, that a price increase to $2 wouldn’t be noticed so much as most of the papers would be sold for only $1 anyway.
The average daily circulation for USA Today is about 1.5 million copies. Exactly how many of these do you think are being sold at a discount outside subway stations?
But of that 1.5 million circulation, how much are the free copies left at hotel room doors or given away on airplanes? I think the New York Times single-copy price is about two dollars. If I was going to buy an actual physical paper, I’d buy something meatier like the New York Times or the Washington Post than USA Today.
I was curious how this compares, so I went to the website for the Newseum. They have a page with images of the front pages of newspapers from around the world. (This can be interesting to see what people are interested in.) Going through some of the US papers, I found this.
The Los Angeles Times: $1.50
Oakland Tribune: $1.50
San Francisco Chronicle: $1.00
Orange County Register: $1.00
The Denver Post: $1.50
Hartford Courant: $1.50
The Arizona Republic: $1.00
The Sacramento Bee: $1.00
San Jose Mercury News: $1.50
New Haven Register: $1.00
The Washington Post: $1.25
The Miami Herald: $0.75
Orlando Sentinel: $1.50
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution: $1.00
Chicago Tribune: $1.50
Chicago Sun-Times: $1.00
The Des Moines Register: $1.00
The Times-Picayune: $0.75
The Boston Globe: $1.25
Detroit Free Press: $1.00
St. Louis Post-Dispatch: $1.50
Las Vegas Review-Journal: $1.00
New Hampshire Union-Leader: $1.00
Newark Star-Ledger: $1.00
The New York Times: $2.50
So raising the cost of the newspaper is done to increase their circulation numbers? How does that work? Who wouldn’t buy the paper at the lower price who would buy it at the higher price and why?
When they dumped the logo they’d been using since 1982 and went with that hideous blue circle thing I said to myself, “What the hell is this? That’s not USA Today!”
The Greenville News down here costs $1 daily/Saturday, and $2.50 on Sundays. Unfortunately, it’s a Gannett paper, so as such, you don’t get anywhere near what you pay for it. I remember when I once put a quarter in a Greenville News paper machine and got a pretty-good-sized paper in which I knew about everything there was to know in a day. Now, you don’t know much about anything, and you still pay through the nose. The L.A. Times might go for $1.50 weekdays, but I think you can still get a pretty good paper from it. Heck, even the Houston one went for $2 on Sundays (maybe $2.50), and that one gave you a good paper for your money.
USA Today only prints Mondays through Fridays, so the numbers I quoted for other papers are not for the Sunday editions. Aside from The New York Times at $2.50, no paper I found (which obviously does not include all of them but I think I got most of the big-city papers) is that expensive.
I think you got most of them! The reason I was quoting the Sunday price for Houston is because I was trying to illustrate that there are places, from what I’ve seen, where you can still get a good paper.