Dear Benicia Herald readers,
Perhaps you have noticed the decline in readership and revenue for newspapers; we have too.
We have thought a lot about how we can continue, and the good news is we have a plan.
Effective Aug. 1, the Benicia Herald will go to three days a week: Sunday, Wednesday and Friday. We will continue to provide our readers with local news, sports, features and everything you have come to expect from a community paper.
However, to succeed moving forward we need your support. From our merchants, we need your advertising. From our readers, we need you to support our advertisers and to share with us what you would like to read in our newspaper.
We believe the Benicia Herald, being a First Street business since 1898, would be missed. This new plan will allow us to keep our readers informed of what’s going on in town. We strive to help our advertisers get the word out to their customers, and getting the news out to our loyal readers.
A healthy local newspaper supports a healthy community.
David Payne, publisher;
the Benicia Herald
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Dear Mister Payne
One way that could bolster The Paper, would be to take advantage of your online presence by having a subscriber area on the site that paid subscribers could access. That way former Benicia residents who are still interested in their former home town, could continue to be a subscriber.
To save work, the PDFs of the printed edition could be available for download for a price.
When I moved here in 1977 and moved back again in 1981 the Herald was delivered with no subscription needed; it just showed up. It had useful information about local happenings as well as an important offering of local merchants for new home owners (landscapers, plumbers, yadda yadda). Unfortunately, you could not survive with just advertising dollars from local merchants and started subscription services which I eschewed simply because there was no value for the buck. I still feel that way about all published paper periodicals. Nice that you have existed for a century, but it is time to go the way of the dinosaur. Nostalgia is only going to get you so far. You might consider making it free again with a map of downtown benicia merchants like the things you see floating around Carmel everywhere. Of course, Carmel (being dog friendly) is a much bigger area with lots of wine tasting, shops and restaurants trying to earn the vacationer dollar–something Benicia isn’t known for because of the short sightedness of the town politicians. The handwriting was on the wall when it took 20 years to figure out what to do with the Lido.