Comment from Paula Wethington
Time: November 24, 2009, 2:26 pm

Update: I have confirmed the pricing for the Wednesday afternoon edition of The Monroe Evening News. It will be $1.50, same as the Sunday edition price. There WILL be lots of holiday weekend ads in the paper.

My co-workers have made plans to get extra papers out to the news racks and news stands, but we know from past experience that the single copy papers sell fast on Wednesday before Thanksgiving.

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Time: November 25, 2009, 4:00 pm

[...] points out that you may have to pay the price of a Sunday paper this Wednesday to get a hard copy of all the [...]

Comment from Jake
Time: December 4, 2009, 12:10 pm

Makes sense to pay sunday prices for a sunday sized paper, luckily I have a great neighbor who gives me his paper when he’s finished with it, so I can save a $1.50 (or whatever the price of our local paper will be, our sunday paper costs $1.50 as well). Yes I’m that cheap… er, excuse me, frugal!

Comment from Paula Wethington
Time: December 4, 2009, 2:58 pm

Jake – I do understand your perspective. But let me explain something about the newspaper business: We really would rather see people buy their own newspapers. That’s the spark that makes our business model run.

In addition to being a newspaper reporter, I’m an employee-owner aka shareholder at The Monroe Evening News in Monroe, Mich. We’re an independent newspaper, not owned by any chain.

It is a well known fact in the newspaper business that people do share subscriptions among friends and family members. Our circulation director could quote me whatever the current formula is of how many readers are calculated per actual paper, but I won’t have a chance until Monday to ask him that question.

The subscription prices more or less pay for the cost of delivering the newspaper to your home, business or news stand.

A large portion of the income stream for any newspaper comes from advertising. The advertisers pay rates that are based on circulation numbers. A newspaper that has 20,000 circulation cannot charge as much as a newspaper with 50,000 circulation because the advertisers won’t put up with it.

Now while web readership has gone up for newspapers, it has been difficult for newspapers to make money off the on-line products. There’s not decades of marketing data for the businesses and advertisers to look at on the web products such as one has for the print products. Monroenews.com is among the older newspaper web sites in the southeast Michigan / northwest Ohio region, and I still get occasional comments from customers along the lines of “Oh, you put the classifieds on the web? I didn’t know that.” (Ugh! I was house-hunting on monroenews classifieds 10 years ago!)

Now, about a year ago, I started paying for home-delivery of the Detroit Free Press at my home. I didn’t have to do that. The Freep is delivered to the office. It also costs extra for me to get the Detroit paper at my home because I don’t live in the Detroit core delivery area (I live about 10 miles south of where that breaks off).

But I had come to rely so much on the Detroit News and Free Press’ coverage of the Michigan economy (Monroenews has a very local focus) that I thought it was time that at least one of the Detroit newspapers got some of my money.

One subscription to the Free Press isn’t going to help keep that newspaper running by itself. But one subscription here, and one more there, and hopefully the news product that I have learned to rely on as a Michigan resident will be able to maintain the income stream to keep filling that critical information role.

So there’s my pitch for newspapers.