We're raising our subscription rates, but The Chronicle is still a bargain

You had to get a copy of The Chronicle-Telegram last week if you wanted to read stories on: • A trial involving a fiery fatal car wreck on West Avenue in Elyria. • Lorain County Commissioner Sharon Sweda's use of her office email to conduct business for her election campaign. • High school football games pitting Keystone against Wellington, Vermilion against Willard and Black River against Clearview. Neither The Morning Journal nor The Plain Dealer provided similar coverage in print. You needed a copy of The Chronicle to read first about: • Cleveland Clinic closing its medical office building in Wellington. • Appointment of a former Bay Village police chief as a new member of Avon Lake City Council. • Vermilion Schools' plan to return to in-person classes. Those stories appeared a day or two later in The Journal and not at all in The PD. Nonetheless, both of our daily competitors charge print subscribers far more than The Chronicle, even factoring in an increase in our rates that will take effect Thursday. True, subscription rate increases reflect an uncomfortable reality for the nation's newspapers, whose advertising revenue has been declining for years in the face of competition from giants of the internet. The decline only accelerated as political leaders braked the economy to combat the pandemic. In response newspapers turned to readers to help make up the revenue shortfall, although papers differ in the how much they charge. I'm a PD subscriber, and my latest bill for the next six months of four-day-a-week home delivery is $324.60. For a full year that would be almost $650, more than double The Chronicle's new annual rate of $286. And we deliver seven days a week. The Journal's stated seven-day standard rate for home delivery is $10.25 per week, which works out to $533 per year. As regular readers of my column know, we at The Chronicle have been raising the cost of the newspaper over several years, trying not to push too far, too fast. Our last home-delivery increase came in February 2019, and the upcoming one is slightly smaller in percentage terms: a little less than 9 percent. (This past spring we also began charging for access to our website.) Too much information? Maybe, but my point is that we remain a bargain. Not only are we a lot less expensive than our competitors, we're a lot more comprehensive in covering and commenting on our market, which is primarily Lorain County. We cover local news and sports more intensively. We publish more opinion on our editorial pages, not just our own but that of our readers as well. We have local lifestyle writers. In short, we remain determined to keep readers informed by about their communities and their governments. Our mission is twofold: to give readers a sense of belonging to a place and to serve as a watchdog on local democracy so they can decide whether to keep leaders or replace them. Our focus is not merely local, though. We provide coverage and commentary on state, national and world affairs via wire services, such as The Associated Press and Washington Post News Service, and syndicated columnists and cartoonists. Then there are the funnies and the puzzles, which some readers — I'm one — save for last as a reward for reading everything else. The Chronicle, in other words, is well worth the price of admission, er, subscription. (In a way it is admission, because a print subscription includes access to the website and the E-edition, an electronic facsimile of the paper, at no extra cost.) Read it at home or on a phone. Spread the paper out at the breakfast table or sneak a peek at it in virtual form during a lunch break at work, in the waiting room at the doctor's office or even in the checkout line at the grocery store. Consider it a take-along companion, available wherever you go and designed to keep you in the know. Andy Young is editor emeritus of The Chronicle-Telegram. Contact him at (440) 329-7111 or ayoung@chroniclet.com.