Nature, story, and local journalism in peril

In which our hero’s efforts to renew a subscription lead to Bigger Thoughts

Last month I received a subscription renewal notice from my weekly rural newspaper. I want to support local news, but $70 per year seemed like more than I’d been paying, and the notice had little other information. It mostly bragged about a new app, and a “National News e-edition” with “Digital content 7 days a week!” This All Access feature was a separate line item at $6.50 per year, and I wanted to learn how to opt out.

So I went to the website. There, I had to create an account. I tried to let Firefox create a secure password for me, but the site wouldn’t accept it, so I tried five lame digits, and it was happy. Then I clicked on a menu item and somehow I had created another account in a different software. I clicked on Subscribe and didn’t seem to be logged in. I clicked on a different Subscribe button and got a blank page. I clicked on My Account Dashboard and then Subscriptions and got to a strange webpage. It prominently suggested that I access the archives of the Cleveland Jewish News (although when I followed that link, it couldn’t find that page). But here, at least, I could click a Renew button.

It was the worst Web interface I had seen in at least 20 years. I can see how there could be economies of scale in assembling individual local rural newspapers into national conglomerates, but it depends on having a competent back office to scale up.

When I clicked the Renew button, I was presented with four options, ranging from “Mail – Amount: $4.92” to “Mail – Amount: $59.” No other information available. Were these different prices for different subscription lengths? Why were they all so much cheaper than the option given on the written notice? Pulling out a calculator, I decided that $4.92 was a monthly rate, $59 an annual rate, and the others must be for three or six months—all at the same per-issue cost. I chose monthly.

Then, the next page revealed the surcharge for the All Access feature, $1 per month. But only $6.50 for a year. Why wasn’t it the same per-issue cost? I kept selecting the fee and hitting Delete; nothing happened. Why couldn’t I opt out? I tried calling the number on the renewal notice. Although it was 3:00 p.m. my time, the office was on the East Coast and closed for the day.

The next day I went back to the site. Studying its data, I saw that I had purchased a $59 subscription last September. Why would that be expiring in February? Then again, I hadn’t actually paid anybody $59 in September—my records show that I had last purchased a two-year subscription in July of 2021—so maybe I shouldn’t ask. I decided to go ahead and put on my credit card the $59, plus the aggravating, non-removable $6.50 All Access fee. Result: “null Exception: Setup error: EXIT_CODE: 4067.” I tried again, then sent the error message to an email address on the site.

Within an hour, I got an email back from a woman based just 100 miles away, who suggested I call her with my credit card number. While we were on the phone, she explained that the All Access fee was required for subscribers who got printed copies of the newspaper in the mail. If I wanted to choose the online-only version of the newspaper, I could pay the same base rate but opt out of the online-only extra features. Then she ran my credit card—and got an error. “I’ll have to call you back.”

The next day her supervisor called me back. She explained that the All Access fee was a flat 50 cents per month. She ran my credit card, apparently successfully. I chose the $4.92-plus-$.50 per month option. Why? Because at this rate, with most of the annual subscription fees paying for the time of these customer service representatives, I don’t expect the company will have much money left over to pay our local journalists for more than a few months.

Now it's three weeks later. My subscription has run out. There have been no charges on my credit card. I received another notice in the mail, identical to the previous one. But I also still receive the newspaper every week. After all this wasted time, the only change is that since I’ve created an account on the website, I now get daily emails urging me to check out today’s National News eEdition. Clicking Unsubscribe seems to have no effect.

Reading a newspaper outdoors (Wikimedia photo)

I post this hilarious incompetence in such detail because there’s been a debate recently about Who Is Killing Journalism. Is it editorial blunders, such as the decisions of Fox News or the New York Times about what to cover? Is it readership that’s too cheap to pay for news? Is it the collapse of print advertising markets, and the way Google and Facebook have monopolized online advertising?

Or is it that business executives in the media industry have made a series of remarkably stupid decisions? Their websites are lame and easily hacked, their pricing schemes are bizarrely complex, their bookkeeping is opaque and fictional, their typo-ridden subscription notices are incomprehensible, and their understanding of their own customer value propositions woefully out of touch.

Yet the effects of those poor decisions will be taken out on local journalists. Because that’s the easiest place to cut costs—in degrading the quality of the product offered to customers. This is, of course, a death spiral.

And yet I also wonder—to bring us back to the title of this newsletter—if it’s a natural story. As much as I resist the idea, maybe these executives are correct: what rural readers really want is a “National News e-edition to help you find key insights quickly without wading through the endless stream of online information.” (“FREE with your local newspaper subscription!” where free is defined as “at a price of $6.50 per year.”)

Why would they be correct? Because everything is getting nationalized. We care about Presidential elections more than our local ones, national bestsellers more than local books, the Super Bowl more than our local high school football team… and signature national wilderness areas more than nature out our back doors. It’s more efficient that way: to care about the fate of wildlife in Yellowstone more than the ecological health of the creek behind my home, to demand that distant oil companies solve climate change rather than alter my driving habits, to support solar farms or high-density zoning on an international level but not in my neighborhood.

This is a very troubling thought. I’d rather dismiss it. I’d rather assume that the incompetence lies elsewhere. And yet I have to acknowledge: There could be economies of scale in assembling individual people into national conglomerates, but it still depends on having the right values to scale up.

Discussion:

• As a kid, my heroes were not only athletes like Jim Rice and John Havlicek, but also the sportswriters who covered them, including Peter Gammons, Bob Ryan, Larry Whiteside, and Leigh Montville. Then at age 15 my very first job was to emulate those masters for a small local paper. Among my immediate predecessors in that role was the future sportswriting legend Jackie MacMullan. Small papers matter.

• In the comments, I’d be particularly interested in your thoughts on if or how small newspapers enhance natural stories.