Saturday, November 09, 2013

Daily Progress to Charge More for Thanksgiving Day Edition

Today I received this message in my email box from Lawrence McConnell, publisher of the Charlottesville Daily Progress:

On Thanksgiving Day, we will deliver to you the biggest newspaper of the year! As always, it is loaded with information you can use and valuable advertising to get your holiday season off to the right start. Because of its sheer size, the Thanksgiving Day newspaper is one of the most expensive to produce and difficult to distribute. And many of our carriers must use additional help to complete deliveries in a timely manner.

Effective this year, we will charge a premium rate of $2.50 for the Thanksgiving Day newspaper. This charge will be debited to your newspaper account on Thanksgiving Day. The small increase in the rate for the Thanksgiving Day newspaper will result in a slightly earlier expiration date for your current subscription term.

We hope you can appreciate the value of the Thanksgiving Day newspaper and the necessity for the premium charge to partially cover our added expenses and those of your carrier.

Thank you for reading and supporting the Charlottesville Daily Progress.
Now, I am aware as much as anybody of the challenges the legacy media face these days. Revenues are down, expenses are up, subscriptions are down, newsstand sales are down while competition proliferates in the form of cable and satellite TV stations, talk radio, blogs, Facebook and Twitter, and web-only news sites.

But think about this for a moment: Just why is the Thanksgiving Day edition of the Daily Progress so big? Or that day's edition of any newspaper?

The answer should be obvious. It's because that day's newspaper carries more advertising than any other day of the year, with the possible exception of December 26.

In other words, the Daily Progress is saying, "Subscriber, we are charging you more because we are making more money that day."

I hope I'm not the only Daily Progress reader who noticed this attempt to turn us into Thanksgiving turkeys.




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