Pricing Newsweek: will flipping the accepted numbers turn print journalism into a premium product? Should it?
Newsweek relaunched its print edition with a whole new calculation for what a print news product should be.
Most news organizations that have made the jump to digital are treating their print editions as a low-price add-on to digital subscriptions. The Wall Street Journal charges $22.99/mo for digital, $26.99/mo for print. NYT charges $25ish/mo for print and web, $15 for the digital alone. The largest newspapers in the nation consider their print editions to be worth $4 and $10 respectively, significantly less than their digital access.
On the magazine side the all-digital or or print-only editions of The New Yorker are priced the same, $59.99 a year, or ~$5/mo. Combine the two? It only costs an additional $10/year. Someone’s value is significantly less in that equation.
The Atlantic’s internal pricing logic is harder to determine. There is the $2.20/mo monthly digital edition and the $2.99/mo weekly edition subscription. The print edition (which comes with full access to the first digital edition) is apparently $24.50 a year, or $2.04/mo. Which means it is actually cheaper to buy the print edition of The Atlantic if all you want is the digital edition, even though the cost of printing the magazine must be far higher than pushing the digital file. The logic here is strange, but the implication has to be that we (the readership) are not expected to monetarily value printed works.
The Newsweek calculation has a priced wall for web access and a far more pricey one for print. $12.50/mo for Print+Digital vs $3.33/mo for digital only. (These are their launch prices, the costs are likely to go up after the first year.) The math is the opposite of everyone else’s. Instead, the print edition is the most expensive part of the equation.
The play here then is straightforward: Newsweek is print as a luxury product. Is this a model that will work? Do we consider our dead-paper copies a premium these days? That’s something Newsweek’s numbers will bear out.
If they do, it could mean a whole new way to think about pricing journalism products.
Then, there’s a question that this doesn’t ask: Should print journalism be a luxury product? Does making it one somehow compromise the ethics of what journalism is supposed to be for? That question may be harder to answer.
