The Conical Glass: Inflation hits home, part deux

Wednesday, July 16, 2008

Inflation hits home, part deux

A while back, I wrote about inflation and how I realized I was affected by it when the price of my favorite cereal rose. (At least they haven't shrunk the contents of the box, as far as I can tell, anyway.) Well, inflation has reared its ugly head again.

I have kind of a weird subscription to the San Francisco Chronicle. A while back, I realized that I could purchase a Wednesday through Sunday subscription, buy the paper on Monday and Tuesday, and save money. At first, a six-month Wed.-Sun. sub cost a mere $19.99 -- what a deal! Then in May of '06, it went up to $36; in December of '06, it rose to $40; and there it stayed until last month, when it rose alarmingly to $78. I checked the web site and a seven-day subscription was $150, so it still seemed like a good deal.

Then, when I bought a Chron at Safeway one Monday, I was surprised when it scanned at 75 cents. Sure enough, the new price was there on the front page in tiny print. It wasn't so long ago that the paper cost 25 cents when you bought it at the store or in a box; it went up to 50 cents a couple years ago. There was no announcement of the price increase in the paper itself.

The cost goes up and the paper gets smaller -- the Chron just dumped its weekly Sunday magazine (it'll be back once a month, emphasizing ad-friendly topics like home improvements and travel), it combined its sports and business/technology sections on Mondays and Tuesdays, and the pages themselves are now physically smaller, in an effort to save newsprint. And last year, they laid off a whole bunch of people. Meanwhile, the entire paper is available for free online. I'm so hopelessly old school that I enjoy reading the real deal, and I spend enough time staring at this blasted screen; I like to take a break for lunch and read the paper. But instead of shelling out 75 cents on Monday and Tuesday, I went over to the library and read it there, for free. There's a coffee shop/lounge area which has all the local rags available; of course, the trick is not buying a food or drink item, thus negating my savings!

I gather that the online version of the Chron isn't a real profit center yet. Maybe they need to learn from the Swedes, namely the wildly successful and money-making Aftonbladet.se, which is Sweden’s second-largest site after MSN, with 3.5 million unique users. I dare you to take a look at Aftonbladet's site -- even if you don't understand a word of Swedish, I'm sure you can still appreciate how eye-bleedingly horrible it is. It reminds me of the TV screens in "Idiocracy," except a zillion times more garish.

As a former journalist, I am sad to say so, but I think my old profession is not long for this world. Smaller paper + higher price + entire product available for free = doom.

posted by 125records @ 8:56 PM

2 Comments:

At 8:02 AM, flasshe said…

I'm not surprised that Aftonbladet is popular. I don't read or speak Swedish, but there seems to be an emphasis on sex there. Maybe if the Chron added sexy ladies and supernovas to their front page, they'd be more popular.

I pay $90 (plus tips) for six months of the Rocky Mountain News (every day). It keeps going up. Yeah, it's probably not worth it, but I like having the newsprint in front of me during breakfast.
At 8:18 PM, yellojkt said…

Newspapers are in financial trouble, so there answer seems to be to raise prices and cut content. That'll work.