It feels like the year has hurtled by us down here at 502 S. Glover St., Building S.
In many respects, it’s been like most other years. We plan, we schedule, we triage all the information coming our way to make good content decisions for the weekly paper and special publications. We work through challenges, anticipated and otherwise. There is a necessary routine, but we never know how it’s going to turn out when we start all over every Wednesday morning to make the next week’s newspaper. We adjust. If you can’t deal with uncertainty, you shouldn’t be in this business.
That said, a certain amount of certainty is always required to perpetuate the admittedly precarious business model that community newspapers are operating with. For us, like our cohorts in the industry, the bottom line is that we have to sustain a consistent bottom line.
Through a variety of means, we have managed to do that the past few years, thanks in significant part to the federal Paycheck Protection Program loans and the Employee Retention Credit program we took advantage of post-COVID. Those gave us a cash flow boost when we needed it, and a bank account cushion that carried us through when revenues were not keeping up with expenses. We have tried to operate efficiently, and hold increases in our advertising rates and subscription costs to small increments.
Where all that leaves us, in late 2026, is here: Day to day, we are not keeping up with expenses, and that has to change. All of our operating costs have gone up steadily, while advertising and subscription revenues have not kept pace. We have been reluctant to raise our prices because we know that subscribers and local businesses are dealing with their own budget-balancing challenges.
All of which is a lot of throat-clearing to let you know that going into 2027, we will be raising our subscription prices and advertising rates, some of which have held steady for years. The classified advertising rates have not changed for more than 15 years.
Our business manager and sales director, Tera Evans, recently did a deep dive, spread sheet analysis of subscription costs, and reported some startling findings.
For the average size weekly newspaper, when you factor in per-copy printing and mailing costs over 12 months, we are making $7.14 a year for each in-county subscription (current cost, $45). For the same size newspaper mailed out of county (current cost, $60), we are actually losing $6.27 a year. Newspaper subscriptions mailed out of state (current cost, $70 a year) are earning us a grand total of $3.73 a year.
Those costs are for a paper about this size, 16 pages. When the page count goes higher than that, we lose money in every mailing category. We do a little better on newsstand sales, but it will be necessary to increase that cost as well (our vendors get a share of each sale).
A quick survey of other comparable newspapers indicates that our subscription and single-copy newsstand rates are notably lower than what many of them charge.
Historically, the bulk of our revenues have come from advertising sales. Our special publications have held up pretty well, but weekly newspaper sales have stagnated in troubling ways. The weekly advertising-to-editorial content ratio for the News is between 20% and 30%. That’s well below industry standards. We make room for a lot of content that serves our readers. It comes at a cost.
So here’s where it gets a little uncomfortable. Lately, the majority of our display advertising in the weekly paper has come from nonprofits. Last week, eight of 12 display ads were from nonprofits. The other four were from long-term, for-profit reliable advertisers, and we thank them (probably not enough). This week, 12 of the 15 display ads are from nonprofits. It’s fair to say that the local economy benefits from having a quality newspaper that reaches a quality audience. We hope the for-profit business community agrees.
You’ll be hearing more about all this soon. We have appreciated all of the support and encouragement — serving our readers is what motivates us. We’re determined to keep it going. It’s important for us to be accessible. To do that, we have to be viable.
