Newspaper subscription

I remember the day clearly that I cancelled my newspaper subscription. There had been several muck-ups with delivery, which I had reported each time. I had sworn that if my paper wasn’t delivered again, then I would do this. Everything had recently been moved offshore, including the births, deaths, marriages and for sale notifications. Now they had moved the complaints and mis-deliveries as well. Each phone call, rather than being directed to the friendly people a kilometre or two away, who I knew would fix the problem, I was sent to the Philippines. When one person pulled up my address, she misinterpreted it as Mount View Palace, rather than Place. I quickly corrected her, though, had I left her thinking I really did live in a palace, perhaps she may have fixed the problem. Instead, each day I rang, telling them my paper wasn’t being delivered and each time I was promised that it would be sorted.

I didn’t want to cancel my subscription, but I figured as they weren’t listening to me or rectifying the problem, the only way to make them do something was to stop subscribing. They would hear lost sales. And so, I phoned the Philippines again to tell them I was doing this (I had already warned them I would) and the reason for doing so.

Having been a journalist at that very paper, I was aware how important subscription numbers were. My stand wasn’t about this particular paper, but about its mother company, who laid off all these friendly counter-people in preference for a cheaper off-shore alternative. These new call-operators clearly weren’t capable of sorting out a delivery problem in Taranaki.

I intended to buy my paper each day from the local dairy but I found I was missing the odd day, due to one reason or another. After a while, I turned to the online versions of both the Herald and Stuff, which pretty much covered the country’s newspapers. Between these two sites, I got all the news, just not the births, deaths and marriages.

With my contacts still in the industry, I knew people like me were becoming a bit of a problem. We were still getting all the news without having to buy a paper and at that stage, there wasn’t a way to charge people through the website. A bit later, the Herald started to make some articles premium, meaning they could not be read without an online subscription.

This is where my next beef comes from and the reason I am writing this article today. One headline I read yesterday spelled out that there were five things dentists wished people didn’t do, as these practises were damaging to the teeth. But it was a premium article so I couldn’t read it. Perhaps that was designed to make people like me buy the paper but I do feel that if something has health or safety ramifications, then it should be a free read, like half of the other articles alongside it on the website. I have often gone and bought a paper after being denied access to an interesting article, only to find that article not in the paper.

I can see the other side of the argument too. Go and subscribe, then you won’t have this problem. That is correct and I get that but I do know that these websites are now heavily laden with advertisements and I know the advertisers pay big money to have their product on display near a front-page story, for example. Is this double-dipping on the paper’s behalf. I worked for a free community newspaper for a while. That was free because the advertisers paid for all the costs involved. If we had low advertising the paper was smaller.

I do feel, if many of the articles are going to be free to read, make sure the ones that have the potential to impact a person’s health be the ones that are free.

Stephen and I still do buy the paper from time-to-time. We have favourite days, particularly the weekend. I am sure that I would still be subscribing had it not been for the cost-cutting measures of moving the call-centre off shore. But once I found I could get all the articles for free, I realised it was another expense I could save on. All these little savings mount up.