SUPPORTING THE RACING POST.

​As the majority of you will be aware the Racing Post, as I predicted in February, has increased its cover price, though not by 10p but to £2.90 Monday to Sunday. I would like to say I was not surprised by the increase. No I was not surprised I was shocked and for a moment or three I wondered how I could ever justify paying so large a wad of money for a daily newspaper and I hoped the increase would only endure for the length of the Cheltenham Festival. But alas no, this was not to be. £2.90 it was to be until at least the next Cheltenham Festival when I predict and fear the price will have to increase again.
I realise that if you are on an editor’s salary an increase of £3.20p a week is nothing but a trifling amount. Even the Racing Post’s columnists will hardly notice the rise in price. Though thinking about it I doubt if they actually have to pay for their Posts as it doubtless comes as a freebie as part of their contracts. So they’ll not even notice the hike in price. I dare say the Post’s columnists still think the cover price is £1, as it was when Sheikh Mohammad inspired the setting up of a competitor to the dear old and sadly missed Sporting Life.
This is the pitfall for the reader when a newspaper does not have a competitor, a rival. The reader tends to get fleeced.
I am neither on the salary of a newspaper C.E.O., nor a newspaper columnist. I am working class. An ordinary worker coming close to the end of a long working life, having made so many poor employment choices along the way, and to buy the Racing Post at £2.90 a copy on a daily basis presents me with a moral dilemma. To fork out over £20 a week on a daily newspaper is barely defendable. To compensate I will have to buy less chocolate. If my other half discovers what percentage of my disposable income is being ‘squandered’, as she would have it, on a newspaper that is read, lies around the living room making the place untidy, only to be recycled at the end of the week, I will require the expertise of a Lincoln Inns barrister to defeat the logic of her argument. The joy I find in horse racing is an element of our relationship she never has been able to comprehend.
Let’s not beat about the bush: the Racing Post is a great read, especially through the winter months and into early spring. I can justify, to myself, shelling out £2.90 every day while National Hunt is centre stage. But can I through the summer? My interest in the flat is not driven as jumping is by my heart and soul. Flat racing to me is, well, a flattened interest. I suspect I shall continue to buy the Racing Post till after Punchestown and then through the summer read it sporadically, perhaps on a Sunday and during the big meetings like Royal Ascot and Galway. And to those of you on salaries rather than pay packets this will sound quaint and no doubt a little sad, I may even put aside money through the summer to draw on through the winter so I can still get my daily fix of Racing Posts.
On a serious note, all of us who read the Racing Post regularly should be aware that the huge increase in cover price is not because Bruce Millington wants to give himself and his columnists a pay rise but because the Post is in a seriously unstable financial position and I fear this humungous price increase may be their last shot at staying in business.
The Racing Post is important to me. It is the life-blood that keeps me truly connected to a sport that has fascinated me since the age of seven when a television came into our house for the first time and there was a programme called Grandstand that showed racing from Ascot. Racing Post columnists are my heroes of the printed word; they inform and entertain and they provide me with debate and subjects I can air on this website. Without the Post and its writers my life would be diminished. It is for this reason, because a world without a racing industry daily newspaper would diminish the sport, I shall continue to support it until truly the pennies run dry. I urge everyone else to make the same sacrifice, if sacrifice it might be.