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

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.