Dallas newspaper asking readers to pay the fare

Talk about gutsy.

With advertising revenue drying up, one newspaper is putting its money where its mouth is. Instead of cutting pages and laying off reporters, The Dallas Morning News is beginning to add pages and planning to start hiring reporters.

But …

They are gambling subscribers will be willing to pay more for that content.

The DMN has raised its single copy price from 75 cents daily to $1 and from $2 to $3 on Sunday. Fifty cents more than the Review-Journal. For home delivery the paper has raised its price 43 percent to $33.95 a month. So far 90 percent of subscribers have re-upped.

"If you look at what we've been through, and what a lot of the newspaper industry has been through, it's been cut, cut, cut," says Bob Mong, editor of the paper. "We want to draw a line in the sand, we want to hold the line and we want to fight back. And we want to do that with good journalism."

The paper’s newsroom is about half the size of five years ago, but it is now adding news pages, converting editors to reporters, adding metro and sports pages, looking to hire experienced reporters. There are some out there.

We’ll see how this works out. Considering the direction its circulation is already heading, this could be risky.