A weekly newspaper’s decision to raise its cover price by 50 percent has provoked a storm of protest on its own Facebook page.
This week’s edition of the Hereford Times saw the paper increase its price from 80p to £1.20.
Editor Fiona Phillips says the paper needed to charge a “fair price” in order to maintain its standard of news coverage and has increased pagination for community news.
However the move has been greeted with dismay by readers who took the paper’s Facebook page to register their objections, with some saying they will not be buying the Newsquest-owned title again.
Linda Ingram Williams commented: “Can’t believe the Hereford Times is putting the price up to £1.20 this week.
“Do you really think a 50pc rise is a good idea with finances as they are? Think people may well be giving it a miss and that won’t bode well for the future of our local paper.”
Christine Allen posted: “40p increase on your paper now it’s £1.20 !! Good luck with selling them as everyone I know will not be buying them. The National papers have never increased by 40p.”
And Colette Cutter wrote: “I have bought this paper every week without fail for most of my adult life. I won’t buy it again as I can get all the news online. Putting the price up by this much is an insult.”
Fiona said the 180-year-old paper was “facing up to the challenges confronting the media in the 21st century.”
“I don’t believe print is dead, far from it and The Hereford Times will survive and flourish in the digital age. But it must change with the times and face up to some tough realities,” she said.
“That is why, from this week, there are some significant changes to the 160-page newspaper. The Hereford Times provides its readers with news, comment, sport and features that they can’t read about anywhere else and we know that the news from our local communities is vitally important to our readership.
“So we are significantly upping our community coverage by increasing our County Times pages to six – publishing news from across the county’s towns and villages; and our sports section to 12 pages – focusing particularly on grassroots sports.
“But that’s not all – in addition our entertainments section is being significantly extended to ten pages to include a comprehensive What’s On guide and everyone’s favourite, a full page of puzzles, and we’ve strengthened both our sports and entertainments teams to bring ensure our quality journalism continues.
“In addition we will be publishing even more views and comments by printing another letters page and I know readers will welcome the return of columnist Nigel Heins’ Flashback features every month.
“Finally, and no doubt most controversially, we are increasing the price of The Hereford Times to £1.20 with effect from this week.
“This is a recognition of the fact that many of the advertising sectors which effectively subsidised quality local journalism are receding and if we want to maintain our high standards and provide coverage which is high quality and comprehensive, then we must charge a fair price.”
The Times’ circulation fell year on year by 6.9pc in the first half of 2012 according to the most recent ABC figures published in August.
It currently sells an average of 31,561 copies a week.
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£1.20p is about the cost of HALF a cup of coffee.
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There’s a theory you can make more money selling fewer papers at a higher price. A dangerous theory when millions of readers are struggling in the economy crisis, and one that could kill off a lot of once-healthy papers. Once you get to a certain low sales level advertisers do not want to know.
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A bold move and of course the new price is a fair one for 160 pages. But the readers will not see it that way. Yes, local papers have sold cheaply for 150 years because they have been subsidised by advertising but it’s a little more complicated than that and the readers, despite the grammatical quality of their posts, are not stupid. Newspaper companies have not just made money, they have made fortunes, and they have been doing everything they can to maintain extortionate profit margins as times got tougher, with product quality being eroded and journalism suffering. They hoped the readers wouldn’t notice and of course they have. They hoped the advertising revenue would migrate to the web but of course it hasn’t.
Result? All the papers are now trying to re-model, charging a price that will give falling revenues one last boost before they sink into the swamp. Fair price compared to a chocolate bar, bag of coal or a tin of cat food but if your customer won’t pay, then you are doomed.
Papers are still making money, in some cases a lot of money, but the companies want margins that are no longer sustainable and they are putting their products, their people and their futures through the wringer to keep those golden margins for as long as they can.
Overworked, underpaid reporter….do you know how much your paper brought in last month? At some stage, they stopped telling you.
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Is this a record price increase for a weekly title ? Is it a good strategy to use hikes in cover price to try and balance falls in ad revenues ? Perhaps what is needed is more innovative thinking on attracting ad revenues. Local businesses understand local paper advertising and in the main trust it to work for them. Trouble is in tricky times many perceive it to be too expensive and therefore resist the investment. Final and somewhat controversial question – are today’s relatively lowly paid ad sales people and their managers good enough to drive ad revenues forward ?
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That bloody coffee argument again! Honestly, if I hear one more person say a paper is cheap because it still costs less than coffee, I may scream. It’s not about the cost itself, it’s about the perceived value. You might as well say “Buy a coffee – it’s only £2.50 which is much cheaper than buying a car!” They’re completely different propositions. If people don’t perceive value in what they’re being asked to spend, they won’t buy the product – and that goes for coffee, papers, meals and everything. Readers just see the quality going down as the price goes up, which only leads to one thing: declining sales.
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Price increases imposed by big national companies last year have wrecked sales, in some cases by more than 20 per cent. Damage limitation was ordered, but you don’t get the readers back when you pee them off like that. And I hear at least one company is considering more hikes!
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I asked the editor yesterday where this price increase was announced
The best answer I got was ‘on the front page as ever’
My last email was ignored
Why won’t I buy the Hereford Times again?
1. No announcement about the increase
2. A HUGE 50% Increase
3. Reader loyalty written off with glib remarks from the current editor
An option to put things right
Apologise and communicate with the readers next week,
HT should say ‘We got it wrong, Sorry!’
Decrease the price of the HT to £1 next week (Still a 25% increase)
Reduce the number of pages if necessary
Forget stupid competitions
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XJP says, “If people don’t perceive value in what they’re being asked to spend, they won’t buy the product – and that goes for coffee, papers, meals and everything.” I think that’s absolutely right. Unfortunately, it’s not clear from the article the extent to which the Hereford Times is giving readers more content – or better content – for their money.
Most buyers of the Hereford Times will continue to buy it at the higher price and so there will be an immediate and significant increase to the profitability of the title. The challenge will be sustaining the revenue increases in the medium-to-long term if sales declines accelerate.
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The Hereford Times has 160 pages so the cover price costs less than once pence per page. The majority of local/regional papers can cost between 40p and 60p for a 48-page publication. The Hereford Times is one of the best weekly papers in the country and, if local people don’t support it, then it will result in job losses for local people. Where will they get their news from? Reading about Hereford as a place. Shops are closing ecause people aren’t supporting them. People have stopped watching Hereford United and the club has lost football league status and local people have turned their backs on the club. Hereford Racecourse has also gone because local people stopped attended meetings…
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Spot-on, XJP. Most people compare the price of their local with their national paper. So you pay 40p for the Sun and £1.20 for the Hereford Times. In their eyes it is like being asked to pay £30 to watch Hereford United and £10 to watch Manchester United.
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Where will they get their news from? Local radio, Twitter, Facebook, the Hereford Times website (at no cost) or maybe the Hereford Journal as a quick search shows that to be a free paper?
One thing is for certain, they might make more money in the short-run but they’ll lose readers, lots of them, & they won’t come back.
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£1.20 for a newspaper is a bit too steep. Anything over about 60-80p is too much.
Most papers should be going the other way really and offering free copies. More people will read it and therefore ad spaces will have more value.
I’ve never understood how newspaper owners can make much money out of actual money made through sales of papers. Surely it’s the advertising that provides the bulk of the money. Or am I being daft?
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Unfortunately, down the past decade or so, newspapers have been shorn of talent with so-called competition from the web voiced.
The fact is in many cases that newspapers, for all the hard efforts of staff, both editorial and other, gave readers and advertisers reasons to go elsewhere. If you cut quality, people won’t buy. To use a football analogy, if you cut your squad down, the club will suffer. In some cases, daily newspapers have cut their team, nevermind the squad, down.
I’ve no experience of the Hereford Times, but 35k for a paid-for weekly stands up well in the current climate.
We’ll see in a year’s time whether the move has paid off, but some daily newspapers are being strangled by greedy bosses, a desire to pay shareholders and cut costs to do so.
Investment in newspapers, quality journalism with reporters and photographers going out to get the real stories and best pictures is being ignored in the hope that a new army of citizen journalists and iPad photographers will be enough to attract readers.
If the Hereford Times is the former, then I wish it well, but I guess lots of the latter will follow in its footsteps if the hike works out.
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Many people in this comments section are saying £1.20 is a fair price for what Ms Phillips calls “160 pages”. However, you aren’t taking into account that, combined, there are only about 40 pages of news, sport, events listings and “local interest”.
The rest is adverts. A great big fat section in the middle with page after page of house listings, car sales, and classifieds for old Friends videos people can’t shed at car boot sales.
To me, adverts do not count as content. £1.20 for 160 pages of news, sport, etc would be more than fair. But the HT is charging £1.20 for just 40 pages, plus 120 of fluff. I am not interested in the fluff.
The HT will be haemorrhaging circulation in the next 12 months.
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Never mind the grammatical errors of those posting on Facebook, try scrutinising the pages of the Hereford Times!
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John asks if he’s being daft in suggesting that surely it’s the advertising that provides the bulk of the money. You’re not being daft, John, but times have changed and the proportion of income generated from cover prices is now a higher percentage than ever before and increasing due to continuing falls in advertising income. What is that percentage? For many local paid-for newspapers, newspaper sales income can be 50% of total income.
David says that, to him, ads do not count as content. I would suggest that people looking for a new job, people in the market for property, people not in the market for a new property but intrigued by the properties other people are selling, people interested in BMDs, people looking to buy or sell second-hand items, people looking for local services like plumbers or electricians and people in the market for a new car have a different view.
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These days, one buzz phrase among many from the people running regional newspapers is this notion of a “fair price” for their products. They might be more successful if they paid a fair wage to the journalists who work for them.
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Actually, David, I’ve just got hold of a copy and sat and counted more than 72 pages of news, letters, sport, leisure and other editorial, NOT including property or motoring pages or full-page advertorials (all in pages 1-48 main book, 115-124 leisure/ents, 125-130 the village correspondents, 131-137 farming, 149-160 sport). So your wildly inaccurate figure is far short of the truth.
Kendo Nagasaki, do most people only buy the Sun one day a week, then?
But I do think such a sudden leap in price is too much to expect people not to notice. And unlike the JP titles which have prominently advertised a cheaper offer to subscribers since some of their titles increased in price, I can’t see anything in Newsquest’s Hereford Times this week.
Anne, I haven’t yet had the chance to closely scrutinise every single one of those 70-plus pages but what I’ve read so far doesn’t ring any terrible alarm bells regarding grammar or literals. Perhaps you could amuse us with some genuine, hilarious examples?
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It’s about time the clowns and beancounters (generally non-journalists) who run our media companies these days realised that internet is not free – someone, somewhere along the line has to pick up the tab (not the internet readers). Why should newspaper readers who pay for their product have to subsidise the freeloading internet readers. No wonder newspaper sales are falling all around us when most of their content is free online. Putting up newspaper cover prices is not the answer – it’s about time internet readers paid their fair share.
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My local paper costs 50p and offers 33 non-sport stories (including news in brief) – Yes, I mean stories not pages – in 56 pages. The £1.20 being charged for what’s being offered by the Hereford Times sounds better value
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Some very interesting and well thought out posts on this subject but of all of them I feel XJP 22 Feb really does hit the nail on the head. Value for our money is what we need.
Also why are we forced to have a Motoring section and a Property section which most of us immediately take out and put in the bin. Lets face it how often do most of us change cars or move house? Could these not be seperate publications with a small cover charge for those people who require them. Why should we subsidise these minority and wasteful sections in the cover price of the paper.
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