Chronicle offers a $280 a year subscription. A survey of readers raises the question: Are they skewed toward the higher end of the pay scale?
The vast majority of the residents (households) of Houston do not subscribe to the Houston Chronicle. The $280 a year is for a digital subscription. A home delivery of the newspaper can easily reach $1.000 a year.
I get billed for my Chronicle subscription every four weeks. My subscription just went up by $7. They didn’t give me a heads up. I now pay $104 every four weeks to support local journalism.
The cost of home delivery is approximately $1,700 per year.
The Houston Chronicle assumes that the people who pay for a subscription are representative of the majority of Houstonians. I would venture to say that most are not. It certainly wouldn’t surprise me if people living paycheck to paycheck said they don’t need to pay for “better” trash collection.
This is what was in the article from the Chronicle;
I am comfortable enough that a fee of $20 a month would not be an inconvenience, but for some people in the neighborhood, it would not be welcomed. There is an elderly couple in the neighborhood who have had medical problems, and they struggle with the bills and medical needs. Twenty dollars would be a burden they don’t need.
Another elderly couple, the husband got injured and is unable to work, but he is too young to start receiving Social Security and Medicare. He was denied SSI; they would not welcome an additional garbage fee charge.
I don’t expect the mayor and the majority of the council members to consider the impact on those people when they vote on adding a garbage fee.
They will probably consider the BS the Chronicle published.