By ERIC MEYER

Staff writer

For the first time in more than 15 years, subscription prices are increasing.

When subscription prices last increased, the cost of a hamburger steak was half what it is now. So was the cost of a 12-pack of soft drinks.

The Record’s prices won’t increase anywhere near that much. The paper believes it is important to democracy to be as affordable as possible so everyone can keep abreast of news.

Still, continually rising costs of staffing, printing, and especially postage have forced the Record to join nearly every other newspaper in the country in raising subscription rates.

Subscriptions remain a bargain. The paper spends far more producing and mailing the issue you have in your hands than it charges you for it.

Community-minded advertisers help make that possible by placing advertisements in the paper.

But fewer local businesses combined with massive increases in cost have forced the paper to make adjustments.

Starting this week, a local subscription will cost $50 a year. In-state subscriptions outside the Marion County area will cost $55. Out-of-state subscriptions will cost $60.

Prices include any taxes plus free access to the paper’s online edition (a $45 value).

Single copies will remain at $1 to encourage readers to sample what the paper provides each week.

In addition to general inflation, newspapers have faced special challenges in recent years.

Several years ago, the U.S. Postal Service won permission to eliminate discounts it had for decades offered on mailing printed material that people paid to receive.

Like clockwork since then, rates on printed matter have increased sharply with every postage increase as the Postal Service refocuses its discounts on trying to lure business away from parcel companies.

In the past 12 months, the newspaper’s postage costs have increased 121%. That’s right. They’ve more than doubled.

It now costs more to mail a newspaper by slow and increasingly unreliable periodical class than it cost to mail a first-class letter when the paper last increased its subscription prices.

Postal rates aren’t the only costs that have increased. The newspaper’s cost to print each issue has increased by 54% in the past five years alone.

And, of course, the newspaper has to pay more for salaries, supplies, taxes, insurance, and all the other things that eat away at everyone’s budget.

Postage and printing combine to consume all but 17 cents of a subscription’s weekly cost, and those 17 cents don’t begin to pay for our biggest expense — the salaries of those who produce content for subscribers to read each week.