By: Joel Davis The Seattle Mariners' runaway success on the baseball diamond this season has helped the Emerald City's two dailies score at the newsstand.
With baseball coverage playing a big role,
The Seattle Times' single-copy sales from April to July of this year climbed 42.71% -- to 27,691 from 19,404 -- over the same four months last year, while the
Seattle Post-Intelligencer's rose 14.45% -- to 27,710 from 24,212.
"We have the incredible luxury of having the fabulous Mariners," said Robert C. Blethen, the
Times' vice president for corporate marketing. "We know winning teams sell newspapers, so we've devoted more pages to Major League Baseball."
Baseball is not all that's driving the single-copy boost at the
Times. The biggest key may be the paper's decision to cut the single-copy price to 25 cents from 50 cents during the strike that ended in January.
Both of the jointly operated dailies were distributed free during the first weeks of the strike, and executives decided a permanent price cut to a quarter would build
Times single-copy sales after the strike, luring back readers who canceled home delivery.
"We saw tremendous interest in the papers during the strike when we were not charging, so we started thinking, 'How can we hang on to that?'" said Mei-Mei Chan, vice president for circulation at the Seattle Times Co., which handles business operations for both the
Times, daily circulation 225,222, and the
P-I, daily circulation 168,951.
With the
Times converting to morning publication in March of last year, Blethen said, the paper is available at Seattle news racks and newsstands by 5:30 a.m., and that has helped sales as well. He added that the paper has learned that single-copy buyers favor its leisure-oriented sections: "We know that single-copy buyers are interested in sports, movies, and restaurants -- places to go, things to do."
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