My mailbox has been peppered recently with offers to subscribe to the Boston Globe. The latest round offered what it called a “revolutionary” price. I’m pretty addicted to news, and anxious that good reporting could go the way of the sets of encyclopedias that people my age grew up with, so I decided to check out the Globe’s offer.
The large print made it seem simple. 99 cents per week for 16 weeks.
So far so good.
That would be just under $16 for four months of the Boston Globe. If extended through the full year, it would be about $50. A bargain.
But there was a bit of fine print down at the bottom of the ad.
The first sticker shock. After the 16 weeks, you agree to pay $3.99 per week for the rest of the initial year of your subscription. You can cancel, but if you don’t, the $3.99 a week goes on your bill.
Okay, that’s a lot. At $3.99 a week, a full year would add up to $207.48. Pricey, but perhaps justifiable. By comparison, the New York Times has a promotional offer of $.99 for four weeks, jumping to $3.75 per week after that.
But the Boston Globe had another bit of fine print.
Yup, that’s the bottom line hidden down in the fine print.
At $6.93 per week, the Boston Globe is going to end up costing you $30 per month, or $360 for a full year. And that’s without getting a physical, printed newspaper.
Now you’re talking real money. That’s nearly double the cost of a digital subscription to the NY Times.
The subscription prices were raised to this level in mid-2015.
Yes, I understand that the Globe is really a regional newspaper. It’s not the NY Times.
But according to a November 2015 article from NiemanLab.com, the Globe’s pricing is working.
The Globe’s analytics tell it that once digital-only readers reach the 13th month of subscription, they’re unlikely to cancel. It’s at that golden point that they see the price increase to 99 cents a day. New subscribers pay 99 cents for the first month. Then, in their first year, the price goes to $3.99 per week, or $15.96 every four weeks. At that thirteen-month point, it’s 99 cents a day.
The Globe has largely moved through a year of that pricing, and is encouraged by the results. “We have migrated the entire base of subscribers that have previously reached their one-year anniversary,” Doucette says. “We are now in the phase of graduating subscribers as they reach their one-year anniversary, and we manage these cohorts on a weekly basis.
“We do see a slightly higher churn rate for subscribers paying 99 cents a day, but only nominally so.” Doucette doesn’t specify a churn — or cancellation — rate, but we can figure it’s in the 5-percent-plus range.
If churn doesn’t go up much when you nearly double the price, what do we make of that? The experience confirms the highly aggressive print pricing publishers have put into place in the last four years: Highly engaged readers will pay more for a good news product than we had ever guessed.
I’m just not convinced, although most of us routinely pay more than $30 a month for cell phone service, and for broadband connectivity at home, and probably for digital entertainment as well.
And if you only read one newspaper, perhaps $30 a month isn’t too much. But for the Boston Globe’s national audience of readers who don’t live anywhere near the Boston area and who want to add the Globe to what they’re already reading for local and national news, the dollar-a-day price point doesn’t make sense. At least it doesn’t make sense to me, and I’m probably more willing than most to pay for professionally produced news.
I still don’t know what the answer is, or what a reasonable overall news budget would be for the average news junkie (presumably more than the average newspaper reader, and far more than the average person).
Any thoughts? In this digital age, how much should we realistically set aside to get professionally produced news from experienced journalists? When all your sources are added up, what do you spend?
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Detailed data from the BLS Consumer Expenditure Survey (CE) show a decade-long slide in spending on newspapers and magazines. In almost every year the average amount has fallen. This corresponds to information from the Newspaper Association of America showing a continuous decline in the number of readers.1 The most recent CE information shows that from 1999 to 2008 the nominal amount spent per consumer unit2 per year decreased by 38 percent, from about $97 to less than $61.
Over the same period, the amount spent by American consumers on accessing the internet through computer information services, which can be used to view online content, has been climbing steadily. While consumers were spending less on newspapers and magazines in the past decade, the amount they spent on computer information services more than quadrupled; increasing from $49 in 1999 to $222 in 2008.
Chart: Annual spending for internet access compared to magazines and newspapers, 1999-2008
Spending by Age Group
The falloff in purchases of newspapers and magazines, both through subscriptions and from vendors and vending machines, has been steepest for the under-25 population, down 58 percent in the past 10 years. The amount spent increases by age group. The 65-and-over group spent the most on newspapers and magazines in 2008 — $95 — but that was still down 22 percent from 1999. This amount was also less than the amount they spent on computer information services — $136.
SOURCE:
http://www.bls.gov/cex/newspapers.htm
one thing to consider:
this trend is not new and
http://www.stateofthemedia.org/2004/newspapers-intro/audience/
Newspaper circulation is in decline.
The root problems go back to the late 1940s, when the percentage of Americans reading newspapers began to drop. But for years the U.S. population was growing so much that circulation kept rising and then, after 1970, remained stable.
That changed in 1990 when circulation began to decline in absolute numbers.
And the problem now appears to be more than fewer people developing the newspaper habit. People who used to read every day now read less often. Some people who used to read a newspaper have stopped altogether.
… Beyond the numbers, it is also helpful to examine reading habits to understand what was driving people away from newspapers, and why it accelerated after 1990. Part of the explanation, of course, is that lifestyle and technological changes altered the news business. The population shift away from urban to suburban America – and the problems that created for home delivery – helped erode the afternoon paper. The evening paper was a perfect match for the 1950s factory worker who came home at 4 p.m. to a stay-at-home mom and a nuclear family. But factory jobs have steadily given way to other forms of employment. Nuclear families are much less the norm. And, married or not, most moms themselves now work. Morning circulation first surpassed evening in 1982. By 2002, there were nearly five and half morning newspapers sold for each evening newspaper.
my conclusion:
The level of demand for news is NOT a money factor; it is a time factor.
Do you wash all of your dishes by hand, clean all of your clothes by hand, walk to work, walk to the store, walk to the movie theater? Do you eat breakfast at the table with the kids *every* morning? Do you pick up a tobacco pipe in the evening, flip on the record player and read the news to relax after a long day at work?
If you do, good for you! everyone else on on their teeny little cell phone.
correction: everyone else is on their teeny little cell phone.
Newspapers in general are struggling with present-day economics and digital media, true. But as Ian correctly notes, something does seem to be amiss with the Boston Globe in particular.
I know the liberal true-believers will dismiss it, but I think the article link below nails the problem: the content.
http://www.mediaite.com/online/bumbling-boston-globe-tries-fails-miserably-in-turning-front-page-into-anti-trump-onion-edition/
Even though the NY Times has a liberal slant to their news coverage, at least they offer some semblance of objectivity and respect to all their readers, no matter what part of the political spectrum they occupy. But the Globe has degenerated into a leftist rag, seemingly designed to appeal to the crowd that thinks of CNN (The Clinton,… err, Cable News Network) coverage as being the gospel. Whatever. If the Globe wants to cater to that crowd, that is their prerogative. But as their dwindling circulation numbers would indicate, independents and right-leaning folks are not willing to subsidize worthless garbage like the fake Donald Trump front page. If lefties want to indulge themselves with this kind of echo chamber, you’re gonna have to dig deeper into your pocket to keep that propaganda machine going. That’s the reality.
The Mediaite article also mentions:
[Circulation and revenue have suffered as a result, as the Globe doesn’t even rank in the Top 20 on the circulation front, trailing much smaller cities/regions evidenced by it getting beat by the Honolulu Star-Advertiser and Las Vegas Review.]
Ha! Even our own local daily sells more papers than the Globe. How the mighty have fallen.
I often read the Globe – but only four stories a month – for free. Civil Beat was a good deal at any price – now it’s free??? ok – I’ll just donate.
National news is available from so many free sources – Reuters, ABC News, CNN, NPR, McClatchy, USA Today, MSNBC, …….. But I consider paying full price for the New York Times a very good deal. Star Advertiser – not so much. Most of their stories are on KITV or KHON on line before the SA has it. I will renew it anyway just to support our local press, but not at their published price.
AARRGGH! I was not aware of that! I subscribe to the Globe for it’s coverage of the Red Sox, to the New York Times for their columnists and for their coverage of politics, to Civil Beat for their in depth local stories, and to the Star-Advertiser for reasons that escape me at the moment. But what’s a junkie to do?