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Our Philadelphia Inquirer Subscription is Increasing to $40 a Month
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Got an email from the Inquirer saying that our subscription price is increasing:
In order to continue to create the kind of high-quality, reliable news report you expect from The Inquirer, we must increase the price of subscriptions. Effective your next renewal date, your renewal charge will be $39.96, equivalent to $9.99 per week. This will ensure that you will continue to receive the in-depth and award-winning coverage that you currently enjoy.
We’re currently paying $35.96 a month for the subscription, and yes, I know we can just call the Inquirer and threaten to quit and we’ll get a reduced rate, but that creates a scribal duality in which the people who do not threaten to cancel end up subsidizing subscription costs for the people who do threaten to cancel, resulting in a spectrum of $40 payers on one end and $1 payers on the other, or whatever the latest deal is.
That’s not our problem; it’s an Inquirer problem, but if your intentions are honest in wanting to support local journalism and keep the Inquirer afloat, then you’re theoretically willing to pay the full subscription price, even though the dollar amount is getting completely out of control.
For one, the site is littered with ads. I clicked on a Craig LaBan Wednesday story to check out the latest in programmatic display and counted seven ads on desktop. The same story had a similar amount of ads on mobile, obviously without the side panel on the right but the same video player, largely similar to the setup we have at Crossing Broad. We need the ads to stay afloat like everyone else, but the difference is you don’t have to pay $40 a month to read our award-losing blogs.
The industry is what it is, rough at this point, but it wasn’t THAT long ago that we were promised ad-free journalism from paywall sites like The Athletic, which in turn decided to sell to The New York Times and go to display ads anyway. Founder Alex Mather said he was going to bleed out all of the newspapers and ended up selling to a newspaper, so go figure.
The thing about ala carte subscription content in 2025 is that the space is competitive and options are myriad. No doubt you’re already paying for a handful of services, like Netflix, or Disney/ESPN/Hulu, or Apple TV or Peacock or HBO Max. Those all just increased in price, about $13-14 on average for standalone services that aren’t bundled. Yet you can still get about three of those for the same price as the Inquirer.
What’s the better value there? Support local journalism for $40 a month? Or get multiple streaming subs for the same price?
And that’s not even getting into sports-only local competitors like PHLY, which offer comparable-or-better content at a cheaper price. If the Inquirer split off some of its sections and offered a cheaper, sports-only tier, I think a lot of people would get in on that, especially conservative Eagles fans in the suburbs who refuse to pay for what they feel is a “liberal rag” (paraphrasing). The Inquirer should seriously think about it, the sports-only sub.
Kevin has been writing about Philadelphia sports since 2009. He spent seven years in the CBS 3 sports department and started with the Union during the team's 2010 inaugural season. He went to the academic powerhouses of Boyertown High School and West Virginia University. email - k.kinkead@sportradar.com