Tuesday, January 03, 2012

All the news that's fit for the affluent, by the elite, at $2.50 a copy, ON WEEKDAYS



Buzzmachine:
The New York Times raised its daily price to $2.50 today. I thought back to the penny press at the turn of the last century and wondered what such a paper would cost today, inflation adjusted.Answer: a quarter.
Screen shot 2012-01-02 at 11.09.10 AM
So, in inflation-adjusted current pennies, The New York Times today costs 10 times more than a newspaper in 1890. Granted, Today’s Times is better than a product of the penny press. But is it worth 10x? Should it cost 10x?
There was a time I loved to read the NYT on Sunday AM.
I would go get it and open the book reviews section. Then the mag. Then Art. Then the week in Review.
It was 1969.
Now despite the fact that Maureen Dowd went from entertaining to a galling does of unthinking Espresso, I won't pay a dime to read some columnists.
I probably wouldn't reward them for the pittance even if Bill Safire still wrote for them.

But at $2.50 each day, WHO DO THEY THINK IS READING THEM?
Especially since by the time you go to a newsstand, or it's delivered and you get the thing and look at, YOU PROBABLY read the events they want to report to you, in the way THEY want you to read it, somewhere else.
Like this..., and from there, the lower half will take you ANYWHERE in the USA and world, to read any paper, any columnist,
FREE.
The print business model is DEAD.
It's pancreatic cancer.
Sorry, but that's how it is.
I regret it, but this world is not the one of 1969.

2 comments:

Alan W. Wright said...

Hey, they have to compensate for declining circulation somehow...

Anonymous said...

Good riddance to the published lies
and the whole industry! Not even good toilet paper.