Philippine Daily Inquirer Rumblings?

What's up with the Philippine Daily Inquirer? Our newspaper dealer warned us that he might stop delivering that broadsheet in the near future.

We got a letter stating that the Philippine Daily Inquirer is going to have a single distributor. Since this will affect the existing network of newspaper dealers, distributors, or news agents, no more copies of the PDI will be delivered to our house.

The letter requests that in case that does happen, we should support the displaced dealers by:

1. Not wasting our time phoning the office of the Philippine Daily Inquirer.

2. Letting the dealer's newsboy carriers know which broadsheet we would like to have delivered (as a Phil Daily Inquirer replacement).

I asked a newsboy on the street for details, and he said the usual P1.50/copy margin given to dealers or wholesalers was going to be slashed by 50% to P0.75 only. At that lower rate, and given the high cost of gasoline, he was no longer willing to deliver PDI to homes.

Will this have an impact on the reach of Inquirer advertisers, given the potential drop in PDI home readership? We'll see. If I don't get my copy of PDI delivered to my house, I'll have to buy from the streets. That means I won't have a copy everyday because traffic conditions prevent me from easily buying while on the road.

If you do a search for the term philippine using the Pixelfast Overture Keyword Tool, you'll see that in the month of January 2006, there were 37,028 searches made for the Philippine Star (PhilStar.com). That's more than double the 17,304 searches made for the Philippine Daily Inquirer.

Is the Philippine Daily Inquirer (Inq7.net) slipping in terms of the mindshare of internet users? And will this change in their distribution strategy cut their home readership? Let's see what happens in the coming weeks.

[ First posted on 03/12/2006 by Manuel Viloria ]