Some Wine With Your Decline? Newspapers Take to Selling Booze On The Side

First it was just “a bit odd.” The second time it was “an unusual brand extension.” But now USA Today has become the third major newspaper to start its own wine club and sell subscriptions to readers for extra scratch. But will this new varietal of revenue just put a cork in the unstoppable flow of hemorrhaging capital? Or is this what newspaper companies are going to look like now?

The Wall Street Journal was the first newspaper to offer readers membership in a wine club in fall 2008. The Times followed suit last month with its own club, and this week USA Today started yet a third newspaper wine club.

There are fewer differences between the three clubs than their eponymous broadsheets. As much as their newsrooms might love to have a ceiling-high stack of cabernet sitting around, all three papers contract the subscriptions out to companies that specializes in mailing wine. The Journal sends full cases to its subscribers, albeit for nearly twice the price of the half-cases hocked by the NYT and USA Today. Journal readers can afford it, I guess. Meanwhile, the Times offers two subscription levels — Times Sampler and Times Reserve — so if having a Times-branded wine club subscription wasn’t exclusive enough, you can pay twice as much for the $180 half-case and feel what it’s like behind an inner curtain of elitism.

We’re still waiting to hear back from the wine clubs about further details of their arrangements with the newspaper companies.

In the meantime, cheers to you, Mainstream Media. May you age gracefully like a fine wine but never sit idle in cellar of our hearts … wait, we just woke up — what happened?

Photo from True Fabrications.