When I arrived at the local YMCA's recumbant bicyles one recent day, Chronicle in hand for my morning read, the guy on the next machine told me he had just stopped taking the paper.
I asked why, expecting another old-white-guy diatribe against . . .
. . . the paper's alleged news bias or its screwy editorials. A lot of other people have told me that's why they quit. People at church. A neighbor.
Not so. "Mr. Jones" said he stopped to save money.
He had taken the paper all his years in Houston, he said, but the annual rate to re-up was way higher than he was willing to pay. I don't recall exactly what he said, but the Chronicle was asking for several hundred dollars of his hard-earned retirement dollars.
How will he get the news? Well, he reads the Wall Street Journal cover to cover, he said, and he is perfectly happy to check chron.com for local stories that interest him. Even the comics are there, he told me helpfully.
Mr. Jones's demographics mark him as a natural newspaper reader -- a retired guy with a big interest in public affairs who starts each day with ink-stained fingers, a glass of orange juice, and a dose of Metamucil.
That the Chronicle is not getting young folks to subscribe is old news. They never got hooked.
That the newspaper is simultaneously losing its natural base -- Mr. Jones and, I suspect, others like him -- is man bites dog, so to speak.
This is how a simple failure becomes a cascading series of failures.
Because the newspaper has fewer subscribers, advertisers drift away, leaving behind a smaller daily product. To make up for lower ad revenues, the paper charges the remaining subscribers more, thereby driving away those with a sensitivity to price.
Whereupon more advertisers drift away and . . . .
Mr. Jones had completed his workout, so he headed home. I picked up my dear, wee, fully paid-up Chronicle and opened it to the editorial page.
Why start there?
I like to start each day with a laugh.
* * *
Speaking of which, the morning drive-time intellectuals at one of the Houston sports babble radio stations did a recent feature on stuff we don't use anymore.
Rolodexes, for instance.
And the poor old paper version of the Houston Chronicle.
They mentioned a colleague who still cuts out the box scores and marks the interesting numbers with yellow highlighter.
"Old school," they laughed.
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