Digital Subs Lagging At The L-A Times

Digital subscriptions at the Los Angeles Times are way below expectations, and leadership, in a memo to staff, said the future of the paper could depend on solving the issue rapidly, according to Poynter.

Whether due to unrealistic expectations or editorial and business failures, the Times is nowhere close to meeting its digital subscription goal. The Times had hoped to double its digital subscriptions from just more than 150,000 to 300,000 this year — a number that would have to be doubled again, the memo said, to come close to covering editorial costs.

But midway through the year, the Times is nowhere near that number, having netted only 13,000 digital subscriptions in 2019.

In a memo sent to staff on Monday afternoon, Executive Editor Norman Pearlstine and Managing Editor Scott Kraft wrote, “Our future depends on rapid and substantial subscription revenue growth.”

They added, “Performance for the first half of the year … has been disappointing.”

The memo said that the Times added 52,000 digital subscriptions, but “significant cancellations during the same stretch” left the Times with a net increase of only 13,000. (A current online offer is 99 cents for the first month and $2 per week after that, or about $100 a year.)

Kraft said via email that in June of 2018, the Times had 131,000 digital-only subscribers. As of today, it has around 170,000, he said.