Is It Good for The New York Times to Raise Its Price? No.

Among the headlines about the newspaper industry I saw this morning was this: that The New York Times is raising the price for the print edition for the second time in the last 12 months, from $1.50 to $2 for non-Sunday editions, and a whopping $5, from $4, for the Sunday paper, if you live in New York. (If you don’t, it’s now $6).

Is this a wise move? Of course, not. In case you haven’t read — much of it in the Times — we’re in the era of the grand penny pinch, and things we all used to think didn’t matter, like spending an extra 50 cents here and $1 there, now matter.  If they didn’t, we’d all still be drinking coffee from Starbucks. Raising the price is a short-term move that guarantees long-term failure under the current business model.

Of course, the sad thing is that the Times has little recourse right now. With ad revenue down 27 percent in the first quarter, It has to get the revenue from somewhere. But such increases, however minor, obviously feed into one of the habits that’s slowly suffocating it: the increasing trend toward reading it for free on the Web. Readership of NYTimes.com has increased by 7 percent in the last year, per Nielsen Online.

I now know this habit more intimately than I used to. My husband and I, looking for ways to save money just like everyone else, recently came to what for us, was a radical decision: to stop subscribing to the Times during the week. This was radical not only because we’ve always subscribed, but because we are both in the journalism business; we’re the people who are supposed to hold on to our sub until the last edition is printed, and then go into a year of mourning when that happens.  We have close friends who work there, making our decision a little, well, personal. But it came clear to us that these days we barely have time to read the physical newspaper during the week, and that we really wouldn’t be losing anything; just swapping the print habit for the online one, which had already started becoming ingrained anyway. Better to spend that money elsewhere.

I still love my Sunday Times, when I can squeeze in some time to read it in between travel soccer games and trips to CVS. But do I miss having the print edition during the week? A little, sure. But not so much that I see us going back any time soon. And by that time, there may not be a print edition of The New York Times.