Is the Sunday Times, or any newspaper for that matter, worth £2? The lessons that seem to be emerging from the newspaper market at the moment is that you get what you pay for.
Yesterday the Sunday Times upped its already hefty cover price by a further 20p to a grand total of £2. The paper also gave readers a redesign of its news section complete with a funky geometric masthead, a new font and layout, including a ragged right type setting for feature stories so beloved of Sarah Sands' ill fated relaunch of the Sunday Telegraph. In all, 598 pages, including the new In Gear section for boys and their toys.
Curiously, the other Sunday Times sections looked more or less as they always had and, as per usual, I merrily chucked the half of them that hold no interest for me in the recycling bin. But I am happy to admit that I think the Sunday Times is still worth it, even at £2.
But while I love the Sunday Times, I don't think I love the other Sunday papers that ramped up their price on the weekends, the Mail on Sunday (£1.40) and the Sunday Telegraph (£1.80) enough to buy them every week at such a price, particularly in a world of increasingly free newspapers.
Just as the British newspaper industry is getting increasingly more expensive, it is getting increasingly free. More than one million readers can pick up a gratis copy of Metro in the mornings. From this morning Brighton became the latest centre to offer the freesheet to morning commuters, in this case 10,000 copies, which its owner Associated Newspapers handed out at Brighton's railway station alongside copies of free morning edition of Newsquest's Brighton Argus.
London now has four free newspapers, Metro and financial paper City AM in the mornings and a disappointing choice in the afternoon between London Lite-weight and thelondonpaperthin.
But I will still read them because they are there and they are free, just as I have time on Sundays to indulge in the small forest that the Sunday Times has now become. But I fear I am less likely to pick up a second or third paper as well - precisely what the ruthless Sunday Times no doubt planned all along.
