If you thought The Times’ recent marketing messages behind its paid online strategy – essentially: you get what you pay for – had historical basis, you’re more right than you realise.
The paper’s Archive blog has turned up a clipping in which the editor of 1789 made exactly the same pitch for subscribers…
“The trifling advance of fifteen shillings per year for real intelligence, can be no object to any Gentleman who reads Newspapers, where authentic intelligence may be found, instead of the whippd-up stuff, which frequently appears in many of the daily prints, oftentimes a week old, which may be compared to stale fish.”
For the full excerpt, you’ll need to visit TheTimes.co.uk and pay your £1…
Which is about 25 times more than the paper cost 200 years back