Publication costs vs subscription income

Continuing our work to remind ourselves and our subscribers what a good value our paper is, we’re sharing this graphic in the paper this week:

Charging $43 for something that costs $123 to produce obviously isn’t sustainable on its own. If you look at our overall finances you see that our advertising revenue mostly covers the gap…as long as you ignore the fact that our pay isn’t great and we don’t offer much in the way of benefits. But that’s a lot to say in a single house ad.

My hope with this image is to affirm the folks who tell us all the time that our subscription and retail prices are too low, and start a conversation with the folks who haven’t thought about it yet.