St. Pete Times to increase price Monday up to 50 cents daily at newsstand, $4 a week for 7-day subscription

Six weeks after the St. Petersburg Times slimmed down its weekday editions, the newspaper will increase prices for both newsstand copies and home delivery subscriptions, raising the weekday-and-Saturday single copy charge to 50 cents and the 7-days-a-week home delivery charge to $4 a week.

Readers will learn of the change in editors notes printed in Saturday's newspaper. The cause: the continuing economic challenges facing every newspaper these days, including increased newsprint prices, dropping advertising revenue and rising fuel costs.

The home subscription increase is an average increase of about 39 cents a week for 7-days-a-week service (lower for weekend only and Sunday only deals), totaling $20.28 more each year. The single copy increase is a 15-cent hike from current levels in St. Petersburg; the single copy charge on Sunday will increase to $1 in Citrus and West Pasco, but will stay at 50 cents in Hillsborough, Central and East Pasco for competitive reasons.

The St. Petersburg Times' newsstand price has often been considered low for a paper of it's size and quality. According to a Washington Post story citing figures from the Newspaper Association of America, the median daily price for newspapers has been 50 cents for a decade and 81 percent of daily newspapers charged 50 cents per copy in 2005. The Post raised its newsstand price to 50 cents on Dec. 31.

According to material collected by the Times from the Audit Bureau of Circulations, the increase will leave the Times tied with the Ft. Myers News Press as the second most expensive 7-day home subscription rate in Florida, behind the Naples Daily News' $4.69 per week, but slightly above the Orlando Sentinel's $3.95 per week, the Miami Herald's $3.54 per week and the Tampa Tribune's $2.94 per week.

This change is part of the newspaper's ongoing drive to increase revenue while weathering the worst newspaper recession in 30 years. Not that I need to encourage you, blog buddies, but feel free to sound off about the changes here -- I forwarded many of your comments about our latest page reductions to top editors here for their perusal.

Comments

[Adam]

I'm not sure what is sadder, the fact that they did this supposedly 60 days ago and I just noticed today or that it signals the continued demise of a once great paper.

The idea of giving a semi-literate rag like the TBT away for free, while coupled with doubling the price for a watered down newspaper really makes me question the intelligence of management. I guess the "Wire" had it right when it devoted season 5 to the sad state of the print industry. It's dying before our eyes.

50 cents isn't an outrageous price, but when you cut back on the content, it seems exorbinant. As part of my go green initiative, I'll probably pass and just read the free copies that get delivered to my company.

[Eric Deggans]

Thanks for understanding and providing ap ost much stronger and telling than the first one. You make some really good points.

[dan smith]

I do Eric. I worked more in the technical side of the paper than the creative. I saw you at the book festival opening for Huffington. My point was that bad leadership and can hurt any company. I suppose TBT and the New York Post will have to be cut out. Wait, the New York Post pays the times handsomely I am sure to print the fix news.

[Chris]

What happened? Did the DNC cut back on their subsidy?

[Eric Deggans]

To the poster Dan Smith, whose message I just deleted; if you want to repost your feelings without insulting specific people, i would be happy to let your post stand. But I have decided to be more strict about insults directed at people who are not public people or are not me. Hope you understand.

[SM in NC]

After living in the Tampa area for 30 years, we now live in a small town in NC. Our local newspaper is 50 cents a day and it only has about 15 pages! Times readers don't realize how good they have it-- and that 50 cents is an incredibly small sum to pay for a newspaper that offers such a wide variety of (mostly) decent articles. Our local paper also charges for online subscriptions. Without the subscription, you can read four stories that the paper displays on its homepage. If you don't subscribe, you can't access anything else. So maybe a tiered system for online subscriptions would work.. I would pay to read the Times online and particularly enjoy the columns. Eric, we don't have a media critic so I delight in reading your column/blog!!

[Eric Deggans]

Wow. i really appreciate those words Niven...

[niven]

Dear Sir
A 50 cents/daily or $4/weekly is not so terrible. As a matter of fact I find it extremely cheap. Think of a cup of a coffee, think of how much other goods we buy daily have increased. Milk, eggs, vegetables, gasoline. So what are those 50 cents that can harm somebody's budget? just a few drops of gasoline or one fifth of a cup of coffee!
I believe that every citizen should realize the catastrophic effect of loosing or overconsolidating the newspapers and should be cooperative as possible to keep this wonderfull industry alive. Yes. I believe in it and I call all Americans to think seriously.
Journalists! Thank you for your work you do 24 hours per day and every day 365 & 1/2 days per year!
Niven, a Businesman

why not up the price. In this scary economy, it seems the move to make. We are becoming brainwashed to increases.If more than two drops of rain fall somewhere, a price will go up. When I was young, there were floods, freezes, shortages, wars, strikes, and we made it though without our paychecks becoming worthless. Give the "politicoes" another few years, and there will not be a middle class, just poor people and our every increasing millionairs who know how to profit from the mess we are in.

[Willi]

While the eEdition should not be substantially different, it could be more detailed. Why not use the web to give more information, not less or different?

[Robin 'Roblimo' Miller]

The day will come when the St. Pete Times is primarily delivered online, and takes a "snapshot" of its Web content at midnight or 1 a.m. and reformats it as a paper printout.

This paper-version price hike speeds up the schedule a little. (shrug) No big deal.

[anonymous]

how come the times never mentions whats happening to the contractors who deliver the paper? if it werent for them, no one would be able to get the paper, yet they keep getting the short end of the stick from managers who have never even delivered a newspaper and who probably dont even know what 3am looks like!

[stettr]

Go ahead and up the price. You'll make even less. What kind of fool management do you have there? It's ludicrous to do this. You will lose what little you have.

[Eric Deggans]

The offerings we have on the Web site are different. But we have to be careful about presenting substantially different versions of the same story between online, and print products because of our systems for archiving stories in our database and our systems for copyediting and factchecking.

I think we'll probably do more of that in the future, but we need more resources in our web department to do it with quality...

[darylt]

Eric,

Why does the eEdition of the Times have to match the printed version? In other words, why can't the eEdition be an expanded version, if it doesn't have the newsprint costs? If the printed brand has to suffer, why does the eEdition have to suffer with it?

[Clearwater Rez]

What a strategy. Give us less and charge us more. This will be the death of a once fairly good paper.

[DoctorDrew]

Be interesting to see how the economics work out.
The "law of demand," means that when the price goes up and NOTHING ELSE changes, less of that good will be purchased by consumers.
However, the interesting variable is that changes to the content of the paper have already been made and not for the better.

[beltwaybandit]

While there is little doubt that the St. Pete Times is the superior daily newspaper in the Bay Area, the fact that other papers in other markets charge more for a copy is irrelevent.

What is very relevent is the concept of raising prices in a difficult economy. Is the Times prepared for whatever attrition as a result? Apparently.

This entire dilemma is simply another example of overmatched management in a traditionally stubborn industry getting clobbered by media trends which have been present for years. Unfortunately, newspaper management chose to take baby steps in response and acted under the misguided assumption that they were immune to what is happening in the media world.

The shift in control of content from the editors (papers & magazines), news directors (TV & Radio), etc. to the end user (subscribers, viewers, listeners, etc.) has been rapid and almost tsunami-like. But it's not like no one saw it coming.

Raising newsstand prices after shrinking the product is not a shrewd management move. It's just more of the same...too little, too late and not terribly relevent to the real problem...a broken industry model.