Sparsely, Sage and Timely
Up by popular demand
In the past weeks, 16 people have signed letters to the editor urging The Light to raise the cost per issue to $1 from 75 cents, where it has been for almost seven years. While these 16 are hardly a random sample of readers, they do include a number of people who periodically have been at odds with The Light’s editorial positions on civic matters; yet they too want this newspaper to survive.
So as of next week, The Light will begin selling for $1 per copy. All of us at The Light are biting our fingernails to see how other readers will react. But then staff also bit its fingernails in 1997 when we raised the price to 60 cents from 50 cents. The decision a year later to raise the price to 75 cents was easier; people buying copies and the merchants selling them found 60 cents an awkward amount.
In the last few years, merchants have received a third of the sales price, but we are asking them to keep their share at 25 cents per copy sold. Adding an extra eight cents to maintain an even third would be clumsy for everyone, and, frankly, The Light needs every penny it can get.
When this paper was founded under the name Baywood Press in 1948, subscriptions cost $1.25 a year, and copies sold on store counters for five cents. The way that amount was divided between the paper and its vendors is now lost to time. Even more of a mystery is how merchants and the paper divided the money when The Baywood Press in 1956 raised its price to seven cents. Was the merchant’s cut two cents? Or was that the newspaper’s? Of course, a penny went a lot further in those days.
Sanity finally returned in 1960, when The Baywood Press raised the price to an even 10 cents.
In 1966, former publishers Don and Clara Mae DeWolfe changed the name of The Baywood Press to The Point Reyes Light. By the time my former wife Cathy and I bought this paper in 1975, The Light was selling for 15 cents an issue. The following year we raised the price to 20 cents. There it stayed until 1978 when the added expense of investigating the Synanon cult, along with our suppliers’ rising prices, necessitated raising the price to 25 cents.
Even after The Point Reyes Light won a Pulitzer Prize for Meritorious Public Service in 1979 for its long-running exposé of the cult, finances here remained tight. Cathy and I, however, weren’t brave enough to double the newsstand price, so in 1980 we settled for raising it to 35 cents.
When Cathy and I split up in 1981, we sold The Light to Rosalie Laird, with us financing the purchase. Laird never made a payment, and at the end of 1983, I took back The Light in a default action.
When I resumed publishing The Light on the first of January 1984, I was in even worse financial shape than I am now. Much of the old Light building (where Coastal Marin Real Estate is today) had been rented to other businesses, leaving too little space to operate a newspaper.
Luckily, enough members of the community wanted this newspaper to survive that a crew of volunteers joined in what amounted to an old-fashioned barn raising to create new quarters. In 1984, the inside of the old Creamery resembled a warehouse, but working nights and weekends for six weeks, volunteers erected walls to section off part of the interior and built the offices that house The Light today.
There had never been a second floor in the Creamery, but an attic (with unavoidably sloped ceilings) was created for the newsroom. The late Sheriff’s Capt. Art Disterheft working alone built the staircase.
Using my Ford Fiesta as collateral, I borrowed $3,500 from the bank to put the company itself in working order. The Light simultaneously urged readers to take out two-year subscriptions if at all possible. So many people did that for the next decade there was a spike in subscription revenue every even-numbered year.
My father died that summer, and I received a small inheritance that subsidized The Light off and on for the next seven years until the paper was consistently breaking even. By the end of last year, however, I was again subsidizing The Light. The cost of everything had gone up: from health insurance to Workmen’s Compensation to wages (which needed to rise as the staff’s housing costs soared).
Like most businesses in Marin County, The Light has not been hurt as badly by the nationwide recession as businesses elsewhere. Advertising income dropped only 1.2 percent last year, but in a nickel-and-dime operation such as this, even a small drop is significant.
As mentioned here a couple of weeks ago, several people have said they are interested in investing in The Light. Before that can be done, however, a limited-liability corporation will need to be established, and that will take some time. People have also volunteered to help us bring in more advertising from over the hill, but that can’t be done instantly either.
In the meantime, The Light has received a bit more than $2,000 in outright contributions plus a $1,000 personal loan. All the same, on Tuesday I had to sell bonds and write a check to The Light for $16,000 in order to pay accumulated bills. That brought my total contribution for the year to $30,000, which is why The Light next week will begin selling for $1 a copy. I simply don’t have enough savings to keep subsidizing the paper at this rate.
Meanwhile, a nervous staff here at The Light hopes that before readers balk at paying $1 for their hometown newspaper, they will remember that a bottle of soda pop can cost more than that these days.
Most owners of small, privately owned businesses never talk this candidly about their finances. I would be hesitant to do it myself had not the Dec. 8 SF Weekly revealed our sorry state and had not the business section of the Dec. 23 Los Angeles Times dissected The Light’s financial plight. By now, the horse is out, so the barn door might just as well stay open.
As part of this open-door policy, I should add that subscription prices will also go up slightly with the new year. As of next Thursday, the cost of an in-county subscription will be $37.50 a year or $63 for two years; one year out of county will be $39.50 or $66 for two years; and one year out of state will be $42 or $69.50 for two years.
Happy New Year all the same, and as Tiny Tim said, "God bless us every one!"