With GateHouse’s Lens, you’ll pay whether you want to or not

I was alerted to this by an Arlington Advocate subscriber a few weeks ago, and now it has shown up in the Medford Transcript: Lens, a 36-page “premium” magazine that is apparently intended as an advertising vehicle, published by the weeklies’ parent company, GateHouse Media.

Nothing wrong with developing a new source of ad revenue—although the only two non-house ads I could find were quarter-pagers for a livery company and a liquor store. Even though Lens was included with our Transcript for free—or, rather, for “free”—it carries a cover price of $3.95.

If you look at the fine print on page 3, though, you’ll see that you’re being charged for Lens whether you like it or not in the form of a truncated subscription to your community paper. With 12 premium editions a year, does that mean our subscription to the Transcript will be shortened by 12 weeks?

Has anyone else seen this? Have you tried to do anything about it?

We are already having a lively discussion about this at Facebook, where I learned from commenters that Digital First Media and Gannett have pulled similar stunts. If you’d like to weigh in, I suggest you do so there.