The Press: Penny-Wise

Is there a way to get more money for a newspaper without making the reader scream? Experience suggests otherwise. When New York’s afternoon dailies went from a nickel to a dime in 1956, all three took circulation losses so severe that not one of them has climbed back to its old level. After a more timid price boost—from a nickel to 7¢—in 1952, two of Detroit’s three papers spent years recovering lost ground, and the third-ranking Times has still not recovered. Yet a fortnight ago, all three Detroit papers raised prices again, and not only got away with it but last week sold more papers (an estimated 2%) than before the boost.

The apparent key to the Detroit papers’ success was that they raised prices only 1¢—a strategy plotted by the Detroit Free Press’s Executive Editor Lee Hills. “My theory,” said Hills, “was that if you have been selling for years at 7¢ and you go up 1¢ that’s just loose change, an extra penny, and the average reader doesn’t care.” Emboldened by their triumph—worth some $5,000 extra revenue a day to the Free Press and the News, $4,000 to the Times—Detroit publishers could foresee further steps in their painless, inch-penny path to the summit of a dime.