On Monday, I wrote here very critically about the Daily Mirror's decision to increase its cover price. Now everyone appears to be at it, including The Guardian and The Observer. What madness is this?
I know papers are suffering from terrible commercial pressures, and the extra sales revenue will obviously help to alleviate financial difficulties, but the end result will surely be a further erosion of newsprint readerships. And the owners and managers know it, of course.
The Guardian and Observer up by 10p apiece. The News of the World and the Sunday Mirror will both go up by 5p to £1. I'd guess that other titles will soon follow suit. It is another severe blow to journalists who still believe ink-on-paper has a future.
I take nothing back from what I wrote about the Mirror, because its decline under its current owners has been markedly worse than its rivals (with the exception of the Daily Express). In other words, the Mirror is a special case.
But let's turn this price rise craziness around to see it from the perspective of those, like me, who believe the newsprint newspaper business model is in the process of disintegrating and that the future is online. This batch of increases is more evidence of that fact.
More and more people, whether they access their news via websites, TV, radio or a giveaway papers, believe that they should receive their news free. And not only news. They can read a wide range of informed comment online as well. They are never going to return to newspapers. Their offspring are never going to pick up the newspaper habit.
A couple of weeks ago I wrote a piece anticipating a further dramatic decline in printed papers, Online is the future and the future is now. These price rises are guaranteed to accelerate the growing movement of online news-reading.
