It looks like my print subscriptions to the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times might have actually earned me some money. That’s because, in the wake of Barack Obama’s historic election, the Wednesday edition of major newspapers are selling on eBay and Craigslist for upwards of $200.
Newspapers are printing hundreds of thousands of extra copies and still selling out. USA Today increased its print run by 380,000 copies and sold them all. The Washington Post tripled its newsstand rate to $1.50 and still sold out. In fact, it sold so many copies the paper ran off another 250,000 copies of Wednesday’s paper on Thursday. People lined up in front of the Chicago Sun-Times’ printing plant to buy copies practically straight from the baler. The examples go on and on.
This seems to indicate a couple of things about the state of print journalism. First, it puts into stark relief just how many people have dropped their subscriptions over the years. Of course, not every person of the millions who bought extra copies used to be a newspaper subscriber. But some certainly were, and it took a presidential election to get them to go out and buy a copy of the magazine.
More important is the concept of commemoration. The Sun-Times is selling framed copies of its cover for $99. The Times will send you a copy of Wednesday’s paper for $14.95, which includes a protective plastic sleeve. Newspaper companies that put their emphasis on their print product used to say newspapers were still valuable journalism because they provided context and analysis, something that couldn’t be delivered immediately. The millions of people buying these extra copies aren’t buying them for the news analysis, they’re buying them because it’s tangible proof of what happened on Tuesday night.
In some ways it’s gratifying that people still turn to papers in momentous times like these. But the newspaper is acting as little more than a photo to frame.
This election was something more than the beginning of the end for print papers—that happened long ago. This election was a true changing of the guard. Political sites like the Huffington Post and Politico saw huge increases in page views—HuffPo was up 472 percent compared to a year ago, and Politico was up 344 percent. Even traditional newspapers’ Web sites saw large increases in traffic. Want to see more polling data? Go to Pollster, FiveThirtyEight or 270toWin, don’t wait for the newspapers to summarize their own polls for you later.
Granted, I said I subscribe to both the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, which is unusual for someone my age. It’s mostly because I want something to read while eating breakfast, and the L.A. Times was practically giving the paper away. I certainly wasn’t waiting until Wednesday morning for my election analysis.
Newspapers love to write about themselves (see all that self-congratulatory Pulitzer coverage), so of course there were plenty of stories (previously linked to throughout this column) about the millions of extra newspapers printed to document Obama’s victory. And most of them had a slight air of gloating. “See, we aren’t dead yet!” the stories seemed to say.
Fair enough, but isn’t it a little sad for your goal to be stuffed in a protective sleeve, then stuffed in a closet and then likely never read again?
Related: Urb magazine founder Raymond Roker compiled a cool slideshow of covers celebrating Obama’s win. Here’s a taste.
