The Richmond Times-Dispatch must be on its last legs. The out-of-town investors are just running some pricing algorithm to see how much addicted fools will pay to keep their access to a shrinking amount of information. There are many people, as we all know, who pay no attention to the billings that just show up on their credit cards.

Two months ago, a snail mail letter announced the cost of our online access would rise “temporarily” from $28.99 per four weeks to $33.98. Billing every four weeks rather than every month means 13 hits in a calendar year, so they were imposing an increase to $442 annually. Having been billed the new amount exactly once, a new letter appeared today.

This one announced an immediate increase to $43.98 per four-week billing cycle, an additional $130 per year. That takes the e-edition price above $1.50 per day. There is almost nothing left in terms of local or State Capitol content worth reading. I know the names of two of their remaining Capitol Hill reporters, one of whom when he calls me is often at home in Maryland.

Unlike most readers, I know where to find the legislative meeting video archives and the meeting PowerPoint slides. I don’t need to pay for a subscription and can find what I want on my own if I think to look. The benefit of the subscription mainly is it reminds when me to look.

Friday’s online edition included some other interesting and depressing information. An inside page included the annual U.S. Postal Service subscription public notice. For the previous 12 months the newspaper was down to an average of 40,400 paid subscribers, about equally divided print and electronic. For the date closest to the filing, the total had dropped to 38,600. The greater Richmond metropolitan region had 540,000 households in 2020, and the RTD used to circulate out to the Shenandoah Valley. 

The idea that a legal announcement or utility regulatory summary published in this dying outlet constitutes official public notice is now laughable. If the legislature took that revenue away, death would be instantaneous. Giving that revenue to Tik-Tok or Facebook (seen daily by far more Virginians), however, causes shudders.

Some of the inputs for the pricing algorithm are obvious. The investors demand X dollars from subscription income. As the total numbers drop, those customers (suckers) who remain must cough up more. And day by day it is more for less. One marketing move that might hold onto people like me would be to give me access to more of the Lee Enterprises Virginia papers, say Roanoke and Charlotteville, for this larger amount. But more for more is not part of the algorithm.

Just kill it and put it out of its misery, people. Slow torture is a terrible way to die. But that is what a hedge fund does, bleed the horse until it dies and then sell the parts to a glue factory. — SDH