Here’s the detail that blows MY mind: Even as it’s trying to wring cost cuts from the Boston Globe, the NYT plans to drive away even more readers by raising the price of its dead-tree version to $2 on weekdays, $6 on Sundays. Hell of a business plan you got there, guys.

21 replies on “Re: One of the Country’s Great Newspapers…”

  1. That’s practically $1k a year. It’s like a fucking bus pass. So now you can spend $2,000 a year to ride the bus while you support the old technology that is Newspaper. The hell.

  7. That’s like the post office’s strategy. Fewer people are using snail mail, so their solution is to raise the price of stamps. Brilliant!

  8. You know, that’s way too much for any paper without two full pages of comics.

    No wonder their readership is dropping.

  9. The NY Times Co may not be aware that Boston is largely made up of four groups: college/grad students, a strong working class, an entrenched group of upper-middle class professionals, and the UBER rich (i.e. Boston Brahmins). Of these groups only the last two buy the Globe (the first group reads the globe online if at all, the second group reads the Boston Herald). So it makes a CERTAIN amount of sense to charge more for the paper since the people buying the paper are disproportionately from the affluent sections of society. HOWEVER this is a horrible LONG-TERM PLAN. The economy just needs to that slump that much lower before the upper-middle class professionals start clamping down on their subscriptions. As for the uber rich readership, they’re slowly dying off.

    Plus why would ANYONE pay $6 for the Sunday Globe when they can get the Sunday Times (complete with Frank Rich, the Ethicist, and Virginia Heffernan’s column) for a dollar cheaper?!

    My modest proposal for saving the Globe is simple (and admittedly probably ill-concieved): the Boston area is overrun with students, in fact we have so many colleges I literally cannot name all of them off the top of my head (though I can think of the names of at least 20). The Globe should create a sister publication that is targeted at the greater Boston student community. Sort of an intra-school paper, staffed by professionals and incorporating stories from the main (and shrinking) Globe newsroom into coverage that’s more geared toward the concerns of the area’s massive student population. The big added benefit of this move would be the rejuvenation of the newspaper ad market by companies wanting to maintain their presence in the lucrative youth market. Hell the Globe could even try and talk schools into buying subscriptions for all incoming freshmen!

    There you have it. Anyone with a better idea let me know…

  10. @9: The $6 for the Sunday paper is for the NYT, not the Globe.

    How’s that reading comprehension class working out for you?

  11. The NYT is in a bind because ad revenues are too low to keep the company afloat, and weighing the survival of the Globe and the NYT means that the NYT itself is prioritized. Raising prices is one way to get loyal customers to pay more to make up for the missing ad revenue, but in reality this will be offset by canceled subscriptions (people in recessions are quick to cancel subscriptions to save money). So, I think this move will backfire.

    I myself used to get the NYT seven days, but when they near-doubled the price a year or so ago I had to lower that to weekdays only, and I buy the weekend editions myself sporadically when I have time for them. I’m surely not alone.

    If the NYT distributed Kindle-style readers to every subscriber for free and largely suspended its national print distribution, they would save a ton of money (and trees). This might be worth considering very seriously.

  12. @7,

    I don’t know if that’s really a strategy. The USPS isn’t really a business enterprise. So if they can’t function without raising prices, they have to raise prices. Cutting costs isn’t so easy when your employees are civil servants.

    $6 is worth it for the Sunday edition, but $2 for the daily? They’re out of their fucking minds. It already takes a week to read the Sunday edition.

  13. if the Globe is so great then why do so many people from that part of the world refer to it derisively as “The Globule”?

  16. The NYT price increase is for newsstand sales. One strategy is to encourage people to subscribe (at substantially less) rather than buy at the newsstand, thus assuring more consistent, ongoing revenue.

    The Sunday NYT is well worth $6 to me. Just as The Stranger is worth every penny I pay for it.

  17. And this is why I am not renewing my NYT subscription when it comes due.

    So much for the paper of record!!!

  18. @10 OOPS. Price hike for the NYTimes not Globe. Clearly those reading comprehension classes are not working.

    Agreed. $6 for Sunday Times= totally worth it. $2/daily….not so much…

  20. It’s like Qwest’s plan to make payphones more available by increasing the minimum rate to make a call thusly encouraging people to use their expensive payphones.

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