How bad does The New York Times want you to keep subscribing to the print edition? We have been seven-day digital plus Sunday print subscribers for a number of years, but our wonderful delivery person left us a note today that she was giving up the job. We decided that was a good time to cancel the Sunday paper.
I contacted the Times, and they offered us a lower price for the next 16 weeks to keep what we’ve got than to switch to all-digital. They are literally paying us to keep Sunday print. So we’ll do that until the 16 weeks are up, and then we’ll see if they come back with yet another offer.
It does make sense that they want people to keep looking at the Sunday ads, and the Times isn’t alone. There are some local papers, including The Provincetown Independent, that charge more for digital-only than they do for print-plus-digital.
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We’d like to support the Times as an enterprise, and it’s great to browse the printed page, but 2 things stopped us taking the print edition. (1) In our town at least, delivery has been extremely unpredictable for decades, and complaints haven’t fixed it. (2) The paper, literally, so much of it, all to be re-cycled. Not does it create a physical burden, but with new environmental perspective it seems irresponsible to encourage.
Not only does it create . . .
The offer that floored me — and that turned out to be one I couldn’t refuse — was that I’d get a free digital NYT subscription for as long as I subscribed to The Athletic, which I find invaluable given my sports interests.
All these newspapers are unfortunately ending their print editions because they cannot afford the print process. But they can’t get the economy of scale with digital ad money that they did for years with print ad money.
They dug their own grave. Good riddance, NY Times.