I sat down with Pagosa Daily Post editor Bill Hudson yesterday, at a local coffee joint. He seemed agitated.
“I need your advice, Louis. No jokes; no wisecracks. Just give me your honest opinion.” He pulled a copy of the weekly Pagosa Springs SUN out of a well-worn laptop case, and spread it out in front of me, with a confused look on his face. The newspaper was opened to the ‘Opinions’ page, and he poked at the editorial column with fat, pink, index finger.
“The SUN is doubling their newsstand price. And bumping up their subscription price. They’re going to be charging $1 for a single issue, starting May 27.”
I told him I’d already read the editorial, and had thoroughly enjoyed it, particularly the references to new pickup truck prices, and the skyrocketing cost of lumber.
“I don’t want jokes, Louis. I want your honest input. Should the Daily Post double its subscription price?”
I reminded Bill that the Daily Post has never bothered to charge for subscriptions. The online magazine has been offered free of charge since 2004.
“That’s exactly why I need your advice. How do we double our price, when we’ve always been free? It just seems like we ought to be keeping up with the times.”
Pulling out my phone, and opening the ‘Calculator’ app, I demonstrated the well-documented mathematical fact that “2 x 0 = 0”.
Bill wasn’t impressed.
“Yeah yeah yeah. I did the same calculation myself, on my pocket calculator. But that’s just a mechanical device. There must be a way to establish a new subscription price, and fool people into thinking that we’ve merely doubled our existing price. Right? Some creative way?”
I asked Bill if he actually thought people would pay money to read the Daily Post.
“Well, I never thought so in the past,” he confessed, adding two more packets of artificial sweetener to his half-full cup of coffee. “But now, I’m starting to wonder. I mean, if people are actually willing to pay $1 for a copy of the SUN? And $400,000 for a run-down mobile home on 10 acres? Are we missing the boat?”
I didn’t like the perplexed look on my editor’s face, but he had, in fact, asked me to be honest. I pointed out that the SUN has a weekly obituary section, where they publish — free of charge — stories about the folks who’ve passed away recently. Perhaps that, by itself, was worth $1 a week?
Bill peered forlornly into his coffee cup, and stirred it, listlessly, with a plastic spoon.
“You’re right, Louis. We don’t even have an obituary section. We don’t have classified ads. We don’t cover high school sports.” He sighed. “You’re absolutely right; it’s a mathematical fact. Two times zero is zero.”
He’d asked me to be honest, and when someone asks me to be honest, I always try to pretend I’m being honest.
But it broke my heart. To see my editor… using artificial sweetener.