I do not subscribe to many paper based publications, but to avoid coffee and crumbles in my keyboard I like a newspaper for breakfast.
My breakfast entertainment is International Herald Tribune (NYT), the occasional lunch reading material is Business Week. And after years of consumer experience I cannot but conclude that they both have a problem; an internal clash between two kinds of interests and knowledge, between journalists and business people.
One group is well versed in modern trends, they might even have read the Cluetrain manifesto and understood it, they're smart and they deliver. That would be the journalist, the columnists, the cartoonists - the good folks that provide the stuff I pay for; the content.
The other group has no clue. That would be the marketing and business people of said organisations. Sadly enough they have a say in the product crafting, rearranging the layout every now and then thinking it will spur more sales. Suspect they have little to do, or rather little else they can do. Take last year when IHT added a "Style magazine" on Fridays. Precisely the kind of reading material I always missed! At last I can see those expensive watch ads in full glamour on proper paper (BTW, who wears a watch these days?). Surely a big hit image-wise that consume-with-both-hands magazine in these neo-puritanism times. Well done.
Then we have the administration of us lowly consumers (don't you love the term Customer Relation Management?): Once a year I try to pay my IHT renewal online. Forget it, French check to the Paris office preferably delivered by homing pigeon, or cash transfer by pouch and donkey (no pony express in France).
Last December my IHT subscription expired, apparently I missed the renewal deadline - suspect the donkey got stuck in a snowstorm in the Alps (I live south of them). So I called Paris. Yep, the money was received two days prior to the end of the old subscription but it takes two weeks from bank notification internally to get the notice over to the subscription department. Pigeon from Paris to Le Havre, steamship from there to New York harbour?
At last the paper started to arrive again, and adding insult to injury they sent me a "first time subscriber" present, hand delivered: A small calendar with IHT in gold letters on fake leather, you know one of those with a week on two pages things that nobody has seen for at least fifteen years, presumed to be an extinct specie. What's the use I wonder, not easy to recycle either with it's fake leather.
But NYT/IHT is not alone, the other day, the cash strapped and panicking marketing people at Business Week sent me an email (at least they're only lagging by a decennium) offering me a rebate if I renewed now. Almost stumbled into the finely crafted trap - sending mails during the night between Friday and Saturday hoping to catch the customer with only half a functioning brain.
Luckily I checked with my last receipt and found that I was not even half way through my one year paid subscription! What cheeky buggers.
I would suggest that the journalists take over these otherwise fine publications and throw out the business people. And please do it now, my patience is running thin.
Comments