As the future of the San Francisco Chronicle appears open to question, my own experience causes me some anguish.
When I first subscribed to the Chron on moving to the Bay Area in 2006, there was a special offer – $19.50 per quarter for Wednesday through Sunday delivery. I think the idea was you’d get hooked and want the other two days also, especially as the Technology section is published on Mondays. But I didn’t really miss the other two days and besides, you can read the Tech section online on Mondays if you really want to. So I was quite happy with that rate.
About a year later, my five day subscription went up to $38 per quarter. Oh well, I thought, that’s the end of the special offer period. The price just doubled, without any notice at all, but never mind. It’s not especially good value, at $152 a year with Mondays and Tuesdays missing, but I’ll stick with it.
But then in March of this year, my subscription suddenly doubled again to $78. Oh well, maybe they’ve moved to collecting six months in advance, I thought. They can’t really be charging me $312 a year for papers five days each week?
Then a further $78 was collected at the start of June. Oh yes they really are charging me $312 a year. So I dropped the Chron a note asking them to explain – was this an administrative error? Because I found it hard to believe that my subscription rate had simply doubled overnight for a second time. At the time, I received no reply, so with regret I cancelled my subscription and waited for it to run out on September 5.
This month, I’ve received several calls from telemarketers (professionals, not Chronicle staff) trying to get me to sign back up to a Chronicle subscription. They’re offering me the weekday papers for eight weeks for $40. That’s an annual rate of $260. That’s only a bit less than the rate I was on previously, without the weekend papers – how is that tempting?
Am I being cheap here, or has the price really got out of control? Let’s put the cost in context; before I canceled, the Chron were asking me for $312 p.a. for a five day per week subscription. If I wanted the other two days, that would have gone up to $403 p.a. That’s more than the cost of my subscriptions to the Economist, Newsweek and Wired combined. On the other hand, if I want to subscribe to the WSJ instead, that will cost me $140 for a full year for both paper and online versions. So yes, however you look at it, $403 for the Chronicle every day is just far too much.
I really struggle to see how putting the subscription rates sky-high can be a successful plan for the Chronicle. If you double the subscription rate for a section of your readership, the likelihood is that many of them will cancel their subscriptions. Let’s say half will cancel. That means the Chron ends up with the same subscription revenue, but halves its readership for those whose subscriptions have doubled. But now advertisers will pay even less due to the lower readership, and the Chron is worse off overall.
If asking for $403 a year is the only way the Chronicle can make ends meet, I do worry about how long their business can survive, because there can’t be many willing to pay that much in these days of online news.
But I will say here what I told the telemarketers who have called me over the last month: Make me a better offer and I will consider renewing my subscription – and when I say better I mean less than half the price of the last offer you put to me. Otherwise, while I do miss my daily Chron, I will go without it because it’s just too expensive – and I’m sure many others, with regret, are doing the same.