The paper NYT needs more than a price cut! I subscribe to it mostly out of habit. I find there's rarely anything in its skimpy sheets that I haven't read on my cell phone the day before. The editorial page sucks. I've long since given up paper versions of WSJ, WaPo and FT (my favorite).
If I were to interview a marketing manager at the Globe/NYT/WaPo/WSJ my first questions would be about the composition of their customers and how they tell the difference between "business" (ie, the law firm lobby copy) and "personal" customers. I suspect the former are inelastic and the latter are highly elastic (note Starbucks abandoned in-store NYT distribution several years ago).
My 88 yo mother still gets her daily NYT, I and the next generation consume online and the grandchildren don't understand why it's called a "paper."
I suspect that the proposal of lowering the price, as Ochs did in 1898, may not work. Back then, higher volume had its advantage in the form of lower average cost associated with the larger printing presses that could print additional copies at a lower price per unit. I assume that nowadays most of the cost is in the distribution or delivering of the paper (for the same reasons of the Balassa-Samuelson effect), a cost that cannot be lowered by higher volume. This would also explain why the NYT, WSJ and FT have an advantage over the Globe and other papers: since their respective subscription bases are located in highly populated, highly dense cities (NY and London), distribution costs are lower than for cities with lower populations and lower densities, like Boston and Washington, and especially Atlanta, Chicago and Los Angeles. Add to this the convenience of unbundling the various newspapers into only those articles that readers are interested in, through the use of internet and the cell phones and tablets, and I think that print will continue to have a hard time surviving.
Not sure why home delivery is the gold standard, David? Perhaps you should make the case for that. I now prefer reading digitally. Think of the environmental impact of making paper pulp (even if recycled), the ink and grease and other chemicals for printing hard copies (particularly in color), then having trucks fan out across the city delivering a paper every day to each home. That paper then has to be recycled with more trucks coming through the neighborhood. It's a pretty big environmental footprint, and for what point? With my electronic edition of the NYT or WaPo or WSJ I can search and cut and copy and do much more. True, I used to like leafing through the pages, but then with a shoulder injury that became painful. Clicking a link is much easier and environmentally friendly!
The paper NYT needs more than a price cut! I subscribe to it mostly out of habit. I find there's rarely anything in its skimpy sheets that I haven't read on my cell phone the day before. The editorial page sucks. I've long since given up paper versions of WSJ, WaPo and FT (my favorite).
If I were to interview a marketing manager at the Globe/NYT/WaPo/WSJ my first questions would be about the composition of their customers and how they tell the difference between "business" (ie, the law firm lobby copy) and "personal" customers. I suspect the former are inelastic and the latter are highly elastic (note Starbucks abandoned in-store NYT distribution several years ago).
My 88 yo mother still gets her daily NYT, I and the next generation consume online and the grandchildren don't understand why it's called a "paper."
I suspect that the proposal of lowering the price, as Ochs did in 1898, may not work. Back then, higher volume had its advantage in the form of lower average cost associated with the larger printing presses that could print additional copies at a lower price per unit. I assume that nowadays most of the cost is in the distribution or delivering of the paper (for the same reasons of the Balassa-Samuelson effect), a cost that cannot be lowered by higher volume. This would also explain why the NYT, WSJ and FT have an advantage over the Globe and other papers: since their respective subscription bases are located in highly populated, highly dense cities (NY and London), distribution costs are lower than for cities with lower populations and lower densities, like Boston and Washington, and especially Atlanta, Chicago and Los Angeles. Add to this the convenience of unbundling the various newspapers into only those articles that readers are interested in, through the use of internet and the cell phones and tablets, and I think that print will continue to have a hard time surviving.
Not sure why home delivery is the gold standard, David? Perhaps you should make the case for that. I now prefer reading digitally. Think of the environmental impact of making paper pulp (even if recycled), the ink and grease and other chemicals for printing hard copies (particularly in color), then having trucks fan out across the city delivering a paper every day to each home. That paper then has to be recycled with more trucks coming through the neighborhood. It's a pretty big environmental footprint, and for what point? With my electronic edition of the NYT or WaPo or WSJ I can search and cut and copy and do much more. True, I used to like leafing through the pages, but then with a shoulder injury that became painful. Clicking a link is much easier and environmentally friendly!