Shrewd Move: Ailing Newspaper Jacks Up Price to $2 Daily

A surefire way to keep customers and add new ones. I figured reducing the daily price might help gain back some of the readers they've been losing in droves, but hey, they're the self-anointed geniuses.

Oh, and on Sunday it'll now set you back $6.

Good luck with that.

The New York Times is raising its newsstand prices for the third time in less than two years as a severe advertising slump forces readers to shoulder more of the costs of producing newspapers.

With the latest changes announced Tuesday, individual copies of The New York Times on Mondays through Saturdays will have doubled to $2 since July 2007.

The upcoming increase, effective June 1, will boost the Times' weekday price by 50 cents, or 33 percent, from the current price of $1.50. The Times, which has the third-highest U.S. circulation on weekdays, increased the weekday price by 25 cents during each of the previous two summers.

The New York Times also is raising the price for its Sunday edition, which is the nation's top-selling newspaper on that day. Sunday's national and Northeast editions will cost $6, an increase of $1. In the New York area, it will cost $5, also a dollar more.

Mark it down: By this time next year readership will be down another 10% and they'll jack it up to $2.50 daily.

Raising the prices of newspapers is risky because it threatens to drive away readers, particularly as the Times and most other newspapers give away their stories on the Internet. The recession also has made many consumers more frugal.

No matter how high the evidence piles, they'll just never admit their far-left slant has anything to do with losing readers.