Pax Arcana
Mike Masnick of Techdirt points our attention to a week-old story in the New York Times that says some magazines are considering raising their prices.
This makes sense to me. I just paid $10 for a year’s worth of my second-favorite print publication on the planet (Wired). You can get a full year (47 issues) of the greatest print publication on Earth — the New Yorker — for under $1 per issue. Seems like a price increase in these situations wouldn’t make anyone freak, recession be damned.
This idea also made me wonder just what in the sam hell Rolling Stone magazine is doing. About eight months ago I started receiving the magazine at my house despite never having subscribed. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t dislike Rolling Stone. It just seemed curious that they would comp me a mystery subscription for no reason whatsoever.
Then last week I pull open the lid on my gold-plated mailbox to find not one but TWO copies of Rolling Stone magazine. One was addressed to me — the other was addressed to the discerning and epic Mrs. Pax Arcana.
Allow me to illustrate my point. I subscribed to this:
And received this:
I don’t pretend to be an economist, but this seems like a curious approach. Perhaps they’re artificially inflating circulation to drive up advertising rates. I don’t know. It’s confusing. And when I get confused, I get hungry. And when I get hungry, I ask questions. And when I ask questions, I forget to eat. I think you can see what kind of deadly spiral I am in right now.
In Switch, Magazines Think About Raising Prices [NYT]
Magazines Looking To Raise Prices? [Techdirt]
