Wait, What? The Boston Herald Now Costs $4.50?

From our Déjà Vu All Over Again desk

Two years ago, sharp-eyed commenter Mark notified the hardreading staff that the Boston Herald had jacked up the price of its daily print edition by 40%, from $2.50 to $3.50

Maybe it’s the lack of ads, but did you notice that the newsstand price of The Herald went up to $3.50 last week? $3.50! More than The NY Times, the Globe, and almost as much as the New York Daily News and the New York Post together! Who is going to be so devoted to Howie Carr, yet so undevoted to home delivery or ipad reading, as to pay that much every morning?

Good questions all.

Now – in response to our recent post about the Boston Globe’s knee-buckling decline in its daily circulation to 68,806  – comes Mark’s latest Herald price-hike heads up.

I don’t see the Herald anywhere on this [Top 25 U.S.newspaper circulation] list. This won’t help: their single copy price apparently went up to $4.50 this week. Seriously?

Seriously. Last Sunday the flailing local tabloid cost $4.

One day later, the daily edition went for $4.50.

That makes a certain amount of sense, since the Sunday Herald’s circulation has long lagged behind the daily’s distribution.

But $4.50? For the flimsy local tabloid?

What the hell, right?

For those of you keeping score at home: Boston Globe print edition, $3.50. New York Times print edition, $3.00. Wall Street Journal print edition, $5.00.

Two years ago the Boston Business Journal’s redoubtable Don Seiffert reported this about the flailing local tabloid: “The Herald’s print circulation was just under 30,000 as of the first quarter of 2020, with more than half of that from single-copy sales at newsstands around and outside the city. That’s down 46% from four years earlier.”

And this: “The size of the Boston Herald has gone from about 240 employees at the end of 2017, before its purchase by MediaNews Group, to just a few dozen today.”

Your back-of-the-envelope update goes here.

6 Responses to Wait, What? The Boston Herald Now Costs $4.50?

  1. […] take a step back, and the Boston Herald looks like a dead daily walking, as we noted earlier this […]

  2. Bill L. says:

    It’s August 7, and now the Boston Globe Sunday magazine doesn’t even need a national holiday as an excuse to *NOT* publish…unless it’s about the Feast of the Assumption.

  3. Warren says:

    I remember on Sundays in the late 70s,when he didn’t get the paper when going to work my dad would give me a quarter to buy the Globe and Herald he’d give me q quarter and I’d get to keep the change

    • Campaign Outsider says:

      Those were the days when the Herald’s daily circulation was somewhere north of 350,000 and the Sunday Globe (all 500+ pages of it) routinely sold 750,000 copies. Latest number for the weekday Globe: around 68,800. Herald daily circulation: under 22,000. Yikes.

  4. Warren says:

    Make that on Saturdays

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

%d bloggers like this: