As I noted here, the price of the Asheville Citizen-Times newspaper from an on-the-street rack is increasing from 50 cents to 75 cents. Watching the impact of the increase will be interesting. I’d guess that of the Citizen-Times’ overall circulation, maybe 30 percent of that comes from people buying it out of the rack. Will the price increase drive down those single-copy sales? Will it accelerate the move toward an all-digital product? Will the Citizen-Times announce the price increase or explain it? Will there be added value in the daily newspaper, or will the newspaper simply explain that it hasn’t raised prices in years and now it’s time?
3 Comments
Hmmm…let me see if I have this right. The paper is struggling with declining readership… Financial woes are resulting in layoffs… The economy is in the tank and consumers are reducing discretionary spending (like purchases of printed newspapers)…and someone reasons that it’s a good time to raise the price of the daily by 50%…makes perfect sense to me!
Has anyone heard about the Christian Scientist Monitor? They are going to a completely web-based format. No more newspapers or print. It would make sense for more companies to do that. That would leave out all but collectors editions of newspapers ala Dewey Wins!
But as it is, I don’t buy newspapers, and I try not to pick up the free stuff because I have an RSS reader and I get everything there, even this blog. But even at that, ACT’s RSS feed doesn’t work. There’s more news in this blog that there is anywhere else, besides.
Ok, is it worth it? Why would I pay to get this paper over a Mountain Express that is free? We all know that the free paper with more local stuff is the way to go. Even for tourism the Mountain Express is a better product. Why is that?
Why has the ACT not taken note of the Mountain Xpress success? The heard the ACT advertising department would cook up these half baked ideas based on competitors newspapers in Charlotte or else where. Everything that was done started off as a winning idea copied from somebody else and then by the time it made it to press it had been chopped up and cut down in size. I have heard of crack pot ideas being cooked up a few weeks before going to press. Boy, that leaves a lot of time to sell ads. What a joke.
Maybe if they had really wanted to turn out a successful product like the Mountain Xpress things would be different. It seems that Gannett and the brainwashed managers and directors can’t see the forest for the trees.