Plainfielders will soon wake up to higher prices for the Courier News.
But will there be less Courier coming to you?
My eye was caught early this morning by the following 'note' on the Courier's online front page --
Note to readersMy first thought was -- 'Wait a minute! Those advertisers are PAYING to be inserted into the paper. And I'm being asked to pay more, too?'
On Thanksgiving Day, the Courier News will be stuffed with more than 30 advertising circulars highlighting holiday-shopping savings around the region. To reflect this added value, the cost of the Thanksgiving Day paper will be $1 at single-copy outlets.
That was before I trundled off on the 'dawn patrol' to my local newsstand to pick up the dead-tree versions of the morning papers.
"So, Mike," I said, "the Courier is going to charge a dollar for the Thanksgiving Day paper?"
"That's not all," he said, "the daily price is going up to 50¢. And they're changing the distribution for the Sunday papers, so that we will have to stuff the advertising inserts into the papers, which is a real pain. AND we only get 10¢ for each paper sold. I'm thinking of telling them we just won't carry the Sunday papers."
I appreciated his dilemma, but asked him what he thought customers like me would do if they had to find another outlet for their Courier. Would they stay faithful to him for their other papers and just go to another store for their Sunday Courier?
"Hmmmm," he said.
"Hmmmm," is what I've been saying to myself for some time now.
Years ago, I looked at the Home News Tribune as an alternate outlet for City press releases. Plainfield used to be in a sort of 'grey' area -- the Home News covered South Plainfield and Piscataway and other Union County towns to the east of us, but kinda sorta NOT Plainfield.
After checking the paper out, it seemed that pursuing that line of press communication was not likely to be fruitful -- and partly because the 'look and feel' of the paper was so different from the Courier's.
When Gannett decided to lump the Courier and the Home News under a single publisher, many of us suspected there would be some unhappy changes coming down the pike -- despite assurances from Gannett and the new publisher.
You may not have my wonkish taste for eyeballing how the news is presented, but you just might have noticed that the interior pages of the Courier look more and more like those of the Home News. Sometimes, the layout and stories are exactly the same (check out the 'State' pages in both papers a few times and see for yourself).
By and large, the Courier has lost the crispness and airy presentation that always made it a pleasure to read, physically, whether or not you agreed with what was there.
That pleasure has gone by the boards.
As have a lot of by-lined stories, replaced by the more generic AP feed.
And so has a lot of local reportage, replaced by blogs (of widely varying quality) tethered to the newspaper. Not to mention the 'cartoon' cruelty inflicted on the paying public.
So, I guess it's no surprise, given the way things are going in the newspaper business, that we should be asked to pony up more for less.
But more for more dead-tree advertising circulars?
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