LA Times increases price by 50%. That should help circulation (not)

The LA Times has lifted the price of their weekday edition 50%, or 25c to 75c, the first price increase for the paper since 2001.

The LA Time’s parent company The Tribune Company filled for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in December.

The move by the paper comes at a time the entire industry is losing advertising at an increasing rate, on top of increasing drops in circulation. The LA Times had a circulation of 739,000 copies in October 2008 down from a peak of 1.1 million copies.

Newspapers have been known to increase prices during economic hard times in the past to counter lost advertising, but as John Norton quoted at KPPC notes, the problem today is that the customers you lose when increasing the purchase price don’t come back, where as once they might have done so.