Our small daily made some moves this week, including putting up one of these donation pleas:
• We went from five days a week to three (we were seven days a week as recently as two or three years ago)
• Tripled our print edition price from 50 cents during the week and $1.50 on Sunday, to $1.50 across the board (mostly so our main circulation person doesn't have to constantly change the racks, was what I was told)
• Introduced several subscription tiers to help retain the inevitable cancellations
• And started a plan to switch our web site to a different platform that will help us turn more toward a subscription-based model, which means more of an emphasis on web content on the days we don't publish.
Of course, all of these moves have brought out the assholes in the community who want to see us fail. I'm a live and let live person, but I might dance a jig if some of them caught the virus and had their house burn down.
One thing I think it's safe to say will come out of all of this, is that it will stomp the accelerator on the death of the print edition at most papers. It's mostly been kept alive as a cash cow to generate ad revenue. If that slows to the point where it's not worth it, why bother? If we had 20 years before print editions mostly went away, that might have been cut at least in half.
