Finance
HOW TO KILL A NEWSPAPER: The Age’s page count goes down while its price goes up, again
See below for a missive just received by our friendly local newsagent just a few moments ago. He’s pretty happy about it actually. Because from Saturday, he can charge a full $2.50 for the Saturday Age. That’s a remarkable 4% more since the last price increase, just 8 months ago, in July 2008.
Either they must be really hurting over at Fairfax and Bryan McCarthy is sitting back in his Chesterfield barking orders: “Put it up another 10 cents you imbeciles – those latte sippers won’t notice.” or things are so bad that they need the money to just make up for the sales they appear to be losing week after week.
At VEXNEWS, we hear many sorry tales of friends of our website trading-in their Age home delivery arrangements for the Weekend Australian. More power to them we say. It’s a much better read and is Catherine Deveny free.
Discussion
5 comments for “HOW TO KILL A NEWSPAPER: The Age’s page count goes down while its price goes up, again”
Post a comment
i’ll happily pay more to get less of it. how much so it disappears altogether?
I’ll pay $2.50 a week for the thing to be shut down for good.
Fact is, almost nobody will pay the price increase, because two thirds of all Age readers are home delivery customers who are protected from price increases. Going to $2.50 on Saturday will give Fairfax about $6,000 in extra revenue each week. Every little bit helps in keeping the debt covenants at bay…
I get a headache even thinking about reading the Saturday Age.
“Going to $2.50 on Saturday will give Fairfax about $6,000 in extra revenue each week.”
That might be true but Fairfax attracts more antisemites by the day with its programme of lies against Israel so they probably don’t care.