René J. Roy is the Editor-in-Chief of Wreckhouse Press.
The cost of living is absolutely brutal right now. The price of wheat has doubled overnight thanks to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which will mean a spike in the cost of bread and grains at the grocery store. And don’t get me started on the price of gas. Three jumps in the interruption clause in the last 10 days have caused every car owner to consider buying a shiny new bicycle or returning to the days of a horse and buggy.
With prices climbing up and up, with no end in sight, the fight to pinch pennies is on for everyone. Here at Wreckhouse Press, we are trying to find ways to continue to bring you your news, without constantly jumping our prices too.
We raised our prices last month, in a reluctant effort to offset some of our skyrocketing overhead costs. But that was something that was overdue no matter what, since the price of our paper had been set to match the same price as the region’s previous weekly newspaper. While that modest hike has helped us and kept things tenable in short term, the reality remains that our costs, like your costs, keep going up.
Now don’t worry – we aren’t going to increase our prices again. Nobody wants to put a bigger bite in your wallet. But I have made the decision to make some changes to our format in order to, once again, offset some of our production costs. Effective next week in the March 21, 2022 edition, most of the newspaper’s content will appear in black and white, with some exceptions.
This change will allow us to cope with the incessant price hikes on papers and inks. Each sheet of paper run through out press costs us a fee called a click count, and it’s currently three times the price for colour. By keeping most of our inner pages in black and white, this cost control measure will allow us to continue the service we love providing, and keep the newspaper in your hands, at the current price.
A lot of our readers have repeatedly told me how much they love the colour photos in the paper and I absolutely do too. So this might be a change that will look a bit funny at first, but we hope that you can bear with us, and we will cross our fingers that our supply costs get back down to a reasonable rate. Once they do, we will be supremely happy to go back to a full colour format.
On behalf of our staff and excellent paper carriers, thank you for your understanding and continued support.
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