It's Good to Live in a Two-Daily Town

As the splendid readers of this blog well know, the Boston Herald’s print circulation has been circling the drain for quite some time now.

A year ago, according to the redoubtable Don Seiffert at the Boston Business Journal (subscription required), numbers filed with the Alliance for Audited Media (AAM) indicated that the Herald’s average weekday circulation had fallen to 22,032, which is roughly equivalent to the number of iced coffees your local Dunkin serves every day.

Knee-buckling graphic from the BBJ.

Consequently, it’s no surprise that the thirsty local tabloid has looked to sources other than its actual news gathering to bolster the bottom line.

Enter the Boston Herald Store.

This week the flailing local tabloid has run full-page and quarter-page ads promoting its Newsroom Collection, urging readers to “Show your support for local journalism with Boston Herald apparel and mugs.”

Here’s the store’s full inventory.

Really, Heraldniks? That’s the best you got?

No GlobeBusters baseball caps?

No Howie (American) Carrnage bomber jackets?

And where’s the I Get It in the Morning. That’s Right: The Herald replica of the paper’s vintage 1970s t-shirt?

(UPDATE: The Missus reliably informs me that it was actually a sweatshirt. She had one when she worked at the paper in 1975. On the front it said I Get it Every Morning . . . and on the back That’s Right. The Herald. At the time, the flashy local tabloid was a broadsheet with a daily circulation north of 350,000.)

The hardreading staff knows that it’s tough putting out a daily paper with a newsroom that can barely field a parks and rec soccer squad.

But maybe the Herald’s puppet management could prevail on the vampire capital hedge fund sucking the lifeblood out of the paper to at least send it off with some decent valedictory merchandise at its sad little online store.

Or is that too much to ask in a world of death by a thousand paper cuts?