We Ask Our
Newsstand Readers
to Buy a Subscription
Pat Desmond
Publisher
6/30/11
This is a “good news, bad news” story.

The good news is our in-town subscription price will remain at $40 a year for this summer.

The bad news is we are dramatically increasing the retail price of our newsstand copies from the current $1 to $2 with the first issue in July.

We hope this will result in an increase in our subscriber base. You can save $65 a year by subscribing rather than paying the newsstand price.

We know that growth in our subscriber base will guarantee we can avoid making changes that would affect our level of staffing. We have watched as the larger newspapers in this region have laid off workers as they reduced costs to meet a problem of declining revenue.

We are moving in a different direction.

We understand the economy is still shaky – that’s actually a big piece of our motivation in making this decision. The Milton Times has a balanced budget. Unlike the federal government, our expenses have to balance the money coming in.

Unfortunately, this year has been a year with rising expenses without a similar increase in income.

The price hike for a single copy is one step in a series.

It is likely the subscription price of the Times will increase sometime this fall.

Newspapers earn money from advertisers as well as from the sale of newspapers.

The advertisers pay the lion’s share of the newspaper budget. With this adjustment, we are asking our readers to take on a greater share of the cost.

Last year, we created a Milton Phone Book as the local economy began to lag. Advertising revenue from the project was our way of propping up our regular display sales.

We are in the process of working on the Milton Telephone Book for 2012. It will go to press in the fall and be distributed at the beginning of the new year. We don’t expect the free phone book will provide the growth we need to meet expenses. But it is one more way we work to keep the community informed.

We maintain two local Web sites. Our main site, www.miltontimes.com, offers community news, legal notices and obituaries for the residents of Milton. We also maintain a portal site, www.miltonconnection.com, to provide a quick way to connect with all the online information about the community. The connection site links to the churches, the government and other organizations in town.

Our Web site reaches many more people than our print newspaper. The web traffic to www.miltontimes.com has grown from 20,000 unique visitors a month to more than 30,000 visitors a month. Obviously there is interest from outside this town of 27,000.

We have watched the local economy struggle in the past year.

We have seen our own long-term readers wait to send their renewal checks until the paper stops coming to their mailbox. Times change. We used to mail out renewal bills 12 weeks before a renewal date and most of our subscribers paid the bills within a few weeks.

People are slower to pay these days. And so we have changed our system to mail our subscription bills six weeks before the renewal date. We send a second notice after the last issue has been mailed. If people wait for the second notice, they will definitely miss one or two issues. Our mailing list is processed several days before the paper goes to press due to the software system needed to create our mailing.

So my message is simple. Please help us get the news out and save money. Renew your subscription. The form for new subscriptions and early renewals can be found on Page 5 of our June 30 print edition, or by clicking here.