While the legacy format is important, “the death of print” is one of the most prominent themes in U.S. įrom this article (I’m omitting its academic citations here, but they’re in the paper all emphases mine): Good news is that, many are still paying (a lot) for print newspapers. Time for legacy media to rethink the whole thing, to drop wishful thinking about an all-digital future - before it is too late. Chyi has argued in many papers that the perception that print is in serious decline is both false and self-inflicted - that is, if media types would just stop saying print is dying, it wouldn’t be. That said…Chyi and I don’t agree on much when it comes to newspaper industry strategy, and I can’t say I agree with where she takes this interesting dataset from there. But this list looks about as logic-driven as ER pricing of pregnancy tests.) The Mercury News, which has thoroughly gutted its newsroom, costs $673 a year - more than twice the better-considered Tampa Bay Times? The San Francisco Chronicle is twice as expensive as the Star Tribune? The Las Vegas Review-Journal costs more than The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Wall Street Journal, or The Dallas Morning News? Pricing is a bit of a black box, of course, a mixture of actual costs, market strategy, and owner greed. (This isn’t Chyi and Tenenboim’s point, but having the data in one place makes it clear how deeply irrational some of these prices can seem when put in comparison with one another. Weekday single-copy prices went up even more, roughly tripling. But in general, these large newspapers increased their prices between 2× and 2.5×. The biggest price-hiker by a fair margin was the Los Angeles Times, who went from a quite-low $104 to about-what-you’d-expect-these-days $624 for a year of home delivery. Here’s the key chart from their paper (click to enlarge):
Despite the increase in price, about two-thirds of print readers remained loyal to a product that has become much more expensive and is considered dying by many. Seven-day subscription now costs $510 a year - print subscribers are paying on average $293 more to have the same newspaper delivered to their doorstep. Seven-day home delivery price more than doubled, and weekday single-copy price tripled. The analysis documented industry-wide, more-than-substantial price hikes. Iris Chyi and Ori Tenenboim have done us a service in a new paper just published in Journalism Studies, measuring the rate at which all those prices have gone up - or at least went up between 20, the span they analyze - at 25 large American newspapers: Even accounting for inflation since then, a Post subscription now costs about 3.5 times what it used to. A year’s home delivery subscription to the Post cost about $130 back then. And kids, gather ’round while I tell you about how angry people were in 2001 when a copy of the Post went from 25 cents to 35 cents.
As recently as 2013, a weekday Boston Globe ran you $1.25 and a Washington Post or Dallas Morning News cost $1. And if you’re in that dying breed of single-copy buyers at a newsstand or coffee shop, those four papers would cost you, on a weekday, $3, $2.50, $2, and $2.49, respectively. The Washington Post or The Dallas Morning News will each run you about $650. A subscription to The Boston Globe here in Cambridge will run you about $750 a year. If you’ve been a daily print newspaper subscriber for any length of time - whether it’s a seven-day morning habit you’ve had for decades or a Sunday-only New York Times subscription you have mainly so your four-year-old will sometimes see Dada reading something other than a screen :raised_hand: - you’ve noticed prices have gone nowhere but up.Ī seven-day print subscription to the Times will now run you over $1,000 a year in much of the country.
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