Newsstand

The Sun will raise its Monday to Saturday newsstand price inside the Baltimore metropolitan area from 50 cents to 75 cents starting Monday, the paper said yesterday. Prices for Sunday and home delivery will not change, said Tim Thomas, The Sun's vice president for marketing. More than 80 percent of the paper's buyers and subscribers will not be affected, he said. The Sun's weekday newsstand price has not gone up since 1995. Since that time, the traditional media industry has been beset with declining circulation and advertising revenue.

The Sun will raise its Monday to Saturday newsstand price inside the Baltimore metropolitan area from 50 cents to 75 cents starting Monday, the paper said yesterday. Prices for Sunday and home delivery will not change, said Tim Thomas, The Sun's vice president for marketing. More than 80 percent of the paper's buyers and subscribers will not be affected, he said. The Sun's weekday newsstand price has not gone up since 1995. Since that time, the traditional media industry has been beset with declining circulation and advertising revenue.

ON Wednesday morning, Nov. 11, 1964, a crowd gathered at the foot of the Battle Monument at Fayette and Calvert streets. The Southern High School band played "Baltimore, Our Baltimore." Milling about were Mayor Theodore R. McKeldin, City Council President Thomas D'Alesandro Jr., Comptroller Hyman A. Pressman, people who worked in the area and a gaggle of lawyers, politicians and judges.All this for the dedication of a newsstand? That's right, but this was no ordinary newsstand. It was Abe Sherman's glass and aluminum stand (with built-in light fixtures and radiant heat)

Joseph Henry Meier, a periodicals distributor who helped launch newsstand sales of People magazine, died of a stroke related to Alzheimer's disease Friday at a hospital in Tualatin, Ore. The former Northeast Baltimore resident was 74. He was born and raised on his grandparents' farm in the then-rural Gardenville section of Northeast Baltimore. Part of the property was later sold to the city and became Radecke Park. "After those early years working the farm, Joe decided to pursue a new career in sales," said his brother, Robert H. Meier of Monkton.

The $3.5 million Maryland Lotto jackpot in Saturday's drawing has been won by a customer of a Baltimore County newsstand, lottery officials say.But the location of the newsstand was not revealed, and the winner did not immediately step forward to claim the prize.When the ticket is turned in, it will buy a lottery annuity paying $182,000 a year for the next 19 years, after an initial payment of $184,535, all before taxes.The winner will be the state's 454th Lotto jackpot winner, and the 50th in Baltimore County since the Lotto game was launched in 1983.

The door of the Parkville Newsstand opens, and out of the drizzly, cold winter night a miniature fur ball called Gizmo darts inside. About 4 feet of dog leash later, the ample girth of Will Klug appears.Bob Daniels, the stand's owner, barely looks up. "Hi ya, Will," he says.It's not indifference. It's 6:45. That's when Will Klug shows up every evening to play his scratch 'n' win lottery tickets (in Will's case scratch 'n' lose), drop quarters into the draw poker machine and talk with whomever happens to be around.

Effective Monday, Nov. 5, the newsstand price of The Sun will increase from 2to 3 This increase -- the first daily newsstand price change in almost eight years -- will not affect our daily home delivery customers.

Beginning with the Oct. 29, 1995, edition, the newsstand price of the Sunday Sun will increase from $1.58 ($1.50 + .08 Maryland sales tax) to $1.75 ($1.66 + .09 Maryland sales tax). The Sunday home delivery rate remains unchanged.The increase in the Sunday Sun newsstand price is the first since 1990. It is necessary to offset continuing sharp increases in the cost of newsprint, our crucial raw material. In the third quarter of this year, for example, newsprint prices were 52 percent higher than for the same period last year.

1) This unavoidable pun has already cropped up in print at least once, but we just can't resist a cheap joke. 2) With a cover price of $2.95, O is going for a slightly different market than the traditional women's magazine -- and it looks like it's going to find it. It had announced a printing of 850,000 for its first issue and has since revised that number upward to 1 million. It has sold 166 pages of ads for the first issue alone, and has commitments for 600 ad pages -- totaling $20 million -- for the first year.

KnowledgeLink Interactive Inc. of Linthicum is acquiring two of IBM Corp.'s information services. The deal, which will be announced Monday, figures to give year-old KnowledgeLink new prominence in a hot but uncertain field of the information-technology industry.KnowledgeLink is obtaining the assets and licenses of IBM's InfoMarket and Lotus Newsstand.InfoMarket is a research service that scans big commercial databases that are not generally available on the Internet. Newsstand is an online service that offers subscriptions to electronic publications.

This long weekend signals that delicious moment when we are officially allowed to kick back and trade in our Wall Street Journals for more beach-appropriate fare, a la the skin-deep newsstand stuff we tend to shun the rest of the year. We understand that some readers might balk at such a wholesale surrender to the unserious, so we'll throw out a weighty suggestion or two as well.Spy highBut first, a magazine that takes nothing seriously -- except, of course, its own irreverence. The July/August Spy puts Martha Stewart on the cover as "Whitey Aphrodite," dishing the dirt on the "queen of pristine."

I am feeling great, and I will tell you why. It's because of this article I read recently that said ... um ... it said ... OK, wait just a minute while I get out this article. ...OK, here it is: According to this article, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania did a study showing that, as males -- but not females -- get older, their brains shrink. Was I ever relieved to read that! I thought it was just me!Here's something I regularly do: I'm walking through an airport, and I see a newsstand, and I think: "Huh!

NEW YORK -- The media and those who rule the media seem to generate increasing amounts of news ink and air time, especially in the broadcasting and publishing capital of New York. But in the nationwide beauty pageant of newsstand sales, media titans were not even among the finalists last year.Time Warner Chairman Gerald Levin, whose every public utterance is covered by news organizations, was on the cover of Business Week's and Forbes' worst-selling issues in 1995.Michael Ovitz, then the omnipotent head of the Creative Artists Agency and now president of Walt Disney Co., graced the cover of Newsweek's second-worst-selling issue last year.

Harold E. Hirsch, a Baltimore businessman who won a Silver Star for valor despite being seriously wounded during the Battle of Iwo Jima, died Jan. 26 of congestive heart failure in Plantation, Fla., where he and his wife were planning to retire. The Randallstown resident was 68.For the the past 15 years, Mr. Hirsch operated newsstands in the lobby of Mercantile Safe Deposit and Trust Co. and in the Court Square Building. He had sold the Mercantile stand this year.He came to Baltimore in 1950 after working in the family grocery business in Fairmont, W.Va.

Beginning with the Oct. 29, 1995, edition, the newsstand price of the Sunday Sun will increase from $1.58 ($1.50 + .08 Maryland sales tax) to $1.75 ($1.66 + .09 Maryland sales tax). The Sunday home delivery rate remains unchanged.The increase in the Sunday Sun newsstand price is the first since 1990. It is necessary to offset continuing sharp increases in the cost of newsprint, our crucial raw material. In the third quarter of this year, for example, newsprint prices were 52 percent higher than for the same period last year.

Recently I discovered that there is no badgering like the badgering that begins when your magazine subscription is about to run out:Dear Sir,Our records show that your subscription to Modern Neurotic ends after five more issues.We know you'll want to continue reading America's premier magazine for the functionally conflicted.Just fill out the enclosed form and receive Modern Neurotic for the super-low price of just $1.79 per issue. Having a bad day? Too jittery to do the math? That's a whopping 70 cents off our already-low newsstand price!