2021 - a year of great changes for our subscribers and readers

What we are experiencing is not a year like any other. It is a difficult, hard-fought, complicated year. Even for us in the media world. In fact, at Corriere del Ticino we went through - like all of you, dear readers, and together with you - a storm from which we have not emerged unscathed and which is not yet definitively behind us. In such a situation, a newspaper like ours, the holder of a virtuous history of over a century that makes us proud and makes us responsible, rather than looking back to gaze at the past must be able to look at the present and anticipate, when possible, the future, interpreting and analyzing changes of society. This is its raison d’etre. And the present and the future tell us that paper, at Corriere del Ticino, still has a lot of life, in spite of the cassandras that a little everywhere in the world have long decreed a certain disappearance. Our task is therefore to continue to satisfy our subscribers, trying to do even better. The COVID-19 pandemic and the lockdown have also highlighted the importance, if not the need, of being able to choose reliable journalism: at the height of the crisis, verified and quality information was and is essential, it has helped us understand what was really going on around us, so bewildering in front of the coronavirus tsunami.

Today we officially open the 2021 subscription campaign: this will be an important year for us, since it will coincide with a change in the direction of the newspaper and, in part, in the layout of the newspaper itself. We will have - and you will have - a more modern Corriere del Ticino, which will be able to adapt dynamically to our times that change so suddenly, while maintaining that identity that has made it successful with readers and subscribers over the years. On the other hand, it is no coincidence that, despite the upheavals in the publishing market, the canton of Ticino is the only linguistic region in which the paid newspaper (ours) excels over the free.

For the coming year, we ask you to give us confidence again by accompanying it with an effort to support our work: the economic situation and the market - we were the lowest priced newspaper in Switzerland in fact we will revise the price of the various subscriptions - for a paper copy will be just shy of 3 francs per month - the price of a coffee - and 35 CHF per year, while for those of AHV age who do not benefit from supplementary benefits the price will rise by 40 francs over twelve months. The decision for this increase was made by the editor and management for two reasons. The first is the need to cope with the situation of extraordinary difficulty that followed the pandemic, with a contraction of the advertising market which indirect aid to the media has largely, but certainly not completely, compensated for to revise the price of the various subscriptions.

The second reason for the increase is instead connected to something positive: the offer we foresee for readers in 2021 has never been so rich. Over the next year, the Corriere, which will have new pages and new columns within it, as well as new signatures, of course, will demonstrate in fact that it is focusing decisively on paper products through a new wide range of inserts. Let’s see them together. The Friday weekly ExtraSette will become AgendaSette from next January 1st, a supplement dedicated to free time and built with meticulous attention to local events and radio and television programs. The former third notebook of Thursday (Corriere3) will be transformed, on Thursday, into a glossy monthly magazine: it will be called ‘Mag’ and will have the aim of strongly relaunching cdt.ch and its vertical thematic channels, involving the whole family in reading.

Finally, some really exciting news: in January we will launch Hub, a high-end monthly magazine that with its eleven annual releases (on Saturdays) will deal with culture, style and trends in the twenty-first century. Alongside all this you will find, on Mondays, “Illustration Ticinese” in the guise you already know and have shown to appreciate and a further surprise consisting of the four additional Ticino Vino publications. This is an editorial proposal that has never been so broad for our subscribers, also considering the presence of the religious weekly Catholica and the whole range of digital products.

But, ça va sans dire, such an enterprising and rich offer would not be possible without subscribers. You are the protagonists of this beautiful publishing reality which, starting from a simple newspaper, is now a multimedia group with print, online and radio and television publications. We all know how much reliable and independent information, which however has its costs, is important in a democracy like that of Switzerland: renewing your trust in us in such a delicate and turbulent period will be a non-trivial gesture, not by everyone, but of high value for yourself as readers and citizens. A gesture that will encourage us to do even better.