How not to do customer service in 2014, newspaper version

So here's a wager for you (I'll provide a copy of AP's newswriting guide by Jack Cappon to the first person who can figure out the puzzle).

One condition: You must be a seven-day print and digital subscriber to The State newspaper.

The setup: Go to the newspaper's website. Pretend you want to look at various pricing to see if, as a consumer, there are options to consider. Try to find where it lists your subscription options other than your existing seven-day-plus-digital subscription.

That's OK, I'll wait.

Try the FAQs. See anything there (of course, that they haven't been updated since November 2012 might  speak for itself). Click on those links and it takes you to the page where you can start a new subscription "from $2.60 a week." Click on that, however, and you are prompted to set up a new account with all new user info and password. If you don't do that, you apparently don't get to see that "from $2.60 a week" rate -- or any other.

You can try it from any number of pages where there are links to manage your subscription, etc. -- same result.

So existing or prospective subscribers are denied some of the most basic information that should be provided so they can make intelligent decisions going forward. And nonsubscribers have to disgorge a bunch of personal information before they can get comparison pricing info. Imagine if Wal-Mart or any other retailer had a gate before you could get into the store. Of, if you don't like the analogy to a retailer, how about a service, like asking a plumber the cost estimate of a repair and being told it's none of your business until you give up a bunch of info (or, if you've used that plumber at all, it's none of your business whatsoever).

All in the name of what? Trying to force people into staying with their current option? Trying to force them to stay with seven-day print (you can do that by pricing, not by hiding the info).

Besides, it's 2014 -- you know, the digital era -- and as a digital user I even expect (hold your breath now), that when it comes time to renew I can go online and change my options (if I find them more useful) and pay for the new subscription instead of having to call an 800 number during business hours and be told traffic is "heavy" and wait untold minutes. (Well, sort of business hours -- 7 a.m. - 4 p.m. weekdays and 7 a.m. to 11 a.m. Sunday. That's convenient and consumer friendly, eh? Makes Comcast customer service seem like it's worthy of a J.D. Power award.)

This is still one more data point on how some news orgs simply don't get that they have gone from a monopoly to a retail/service business. Spot checking around. (In none of these cases can I tell whether existing subscribers can change their plans online.):

• The Augusta Chronicle - not much better. Gives you an" as low as" monthly price, but no options for various home delivery frequencies. Clicking on "learn more" just gives you a bunch of sales copy about the service, no prices. Clicking on the digital only gives you a teaser rate. Clicking on print plus digital stops you with a wall demanding your ZIP code. Put in 30912 and you'll get the options (not sure if that link will work directly).
•  Post and Courier (Charleston): Well, at least there are options in pricing. But each is an "introductory rate" with no indication what the normal rate will be starting in the seventh month. (OK, so the paper is taking its cues from the cable or phone companies, but it's a start.)
• The Greenville News - a winner! All the options laid out. Now, if the paper would just get rid of the annoying splash screen with the condescending option "No, I don't want to save."
• Herald-Journal (Spartanburg) - another winner with it all laid out.
• Florence Morning News - It's all there, though not many options, eh? (This is the pricing model I referred to above.)
• Times and Democrat (Orangeburg) - It's there, but don't be fooled by putting a local ZIP code into the "home delivery information" form at the bottom. All you'll get is a 404 error. Instead, click on "start a new home delivery subscription" for print-only rates. If you want the print and digital package, or digital only, you'll have to click on "online subscription" and be hit with an annoying splash screen with the options. But here's the rub. It appears that if you want a print-digital bundle, you have to do the home delivery option first, create that and then go here to add the digital. So much for one-stop shopping (hey, guys, find out how Amazon does it).
• Island Packet (Hilton Head) and Beaufort Gazette (McClatchy papers along with The State) - well, it's there if you root around. One you follow that link, click on "print & digital" and then on "view delivery rates."
• The Herald (Rock Hill) - at first, looks like the other McClatchy papers. But lo and behold, click on the print and digital link and a really smart form comes up that lets you pick a plan before you have to disgorge any personal info (and you get a gift to boot!).
• Myrtle Beach (McClatchy) - just as bad as The State. (So if other McClatchy papers can show rates, why can't all?)
• Charlotte Observer (McClatchy) - Hits you with the ZIP code, but once you put that in, you get rates.

For all I know, The State will give you rates once you disgorge all your personal info, but I find that troubling  in so many ways (you harvest my data to sell to others just so I can see your pricing?).

The State makes it even more torturous. Log into your account and there is a "Delivery Options" link. Follow it (you can't from here without logging in) and all you get (at least all I get) is "start a new subscription," "vacation holds" and "report delivery problems." Click on the new subscriptions link, and all I get are options for Go Gamecocks and Lake Murray Magazine. Someone truly evil has had to figure out this consumer torture.

What is even more interesting to me is that on many of these websites, "subscribe" is in small type and has to be hunted down. Aren't we in the business here of getting people to subscribe? And many are pushing E-Z pay, the auto draft on your credit card or bank account. Read the fine print. Orangeburg, for instance, says that's an extra $18.

But maybe you know something I don't. Have at it and share.

Update, 2 p.m. 7/29: After a 12-minute call to customer service, here are some of the rate plans (compared with $288.60 for seven-day delivery and digital - 79 cents a day); all include digital:
Thursday-Sunday: $195.52 (94 cents a day)
Friday-Sunday: $177.84 ($1.14 a day)
Saturday-Sunday: $159.64 ($1.54 a day)

All per-day prices are approximate. I just multiplied 52 by the number of days each week; there might be slight variations, but I did not count actual days.


I did not price Monday-Saturday, Monday-Friday or Sunday only.

If you want to understand newspapers' future ...

Then you have to read the interview with Media General CEO Marshall Morton in RichmondBizSense.com about why Media General agreed to sell most of its papers to Warren Buffett.

Say all you want about "Mismanagement General" - and there's plenty that can be said. But Morton lays some stark truths on the line:

Although the bulk of its cash flow — 87 percent in the first quarter —comes from its TV stations, owning newspapers put Media General at a disadvantage when it came time to renegotiate its huge debt load.

That blindsided Media General, Morton said.

“The banks who had lent us the money no longer wanted to lend to media companies,” Morton said. “They just don’t have confidence in newspapers. You can talk until you’re blue in the face about the value of newspapers in communities, but if you can’t get capital …”

And this:

Publishing revenues are down about 50 percent over the past five years, Morton said, but much of the costs— printing presses, delivery drivers, etc. — have held steady.

“There was nowhere to hide from these revenue declines,” Morton said.

“Over the past five years, our first thought was that this was heavily due to the recession and, like many other recessions in the past, that this was a cycle. You tighten your belt, freeze hiring and even drop the number of people.

“So we went through a couple years thinking that was the way to handle it. But it kept going.”

It wasn’t until the second quarter of 2011, Morton says, “that we realized the world had changed.”

I don't think Buffett is all nostalgic and doesn't understand the newspaper business as people like Clay Shirky suggest. In fact, I don't think he really bought newspapers at all - he bought cash flow from properties that, in general because of their location, are likely to throw off decent cash for at least a decade. He bought them at a fire-sale price. And he got the real estate and a 20 percent stake in Media General's broadcast operations as well (just as has often been noted, McDonald's is not so much a hamburger company as a real estate holding company that happens to sell hamburgers.

So when he's done getting he cash, he can flip the real estate (if not before)

Meanwhile, over at John Robinson's blog, in response to his skeptical post about paywalls, we continue to get from some of the comments the same old take-it-on-faith rubbish that as the younger generation gets older, has families, etc., they will become newspaper readers. Rip Van Winkle can't top that. Every stick of research in the past 20 years shows that each generational cohort reads the newspaper less and does not convert as it ages. Back to my rant last week about journalists failing to even read the research about their industry - and then waking up surprised.

Community newspapers and online

Some new research by Mike Jenner at the University of Missouri presented at the industry "Mega-conference" this past week finds that publishers of weeklies see a long future for print, but they are moving -- slowly -- into the digital realm as well.

From the write-up in the Southern Newspaper Publishers Association bulletin:

The absence of ubiquitous broadband Internet access across weekly markets and the competition for readers and advertisers are behind some of the decisions to implement paid content and mobile platforms and products.

Thirty-six percent of weekly publishers say their market is not saturated with broadband Internet coverage. Another 33 percent say their markets are saturated; while 31 percent are neutral.

Publishers see greater competition in their markets for ad dollars than for news coverage. Only 24 percent say they’re in a competitive news market. But the perception of competition for advertising is a different story: 47 percent of publishers say they’re in competitive advertising markets. One quarter say their markets are not competitive for advertising; another 28 percent are neutral.

Ninety-five percent of weeklies with more than 5,000 circulation have websites, compared to 77 percent of those with less than 5,000 circulation.

Pay Walls: Times of London tops 100K subs

So is the Times of London's much-derided pay wall strategy working?

If you look at the latest figures from Paid Content, the answer seems to be - maybe. The number of subscribers had topped 100,000, equating to about $1.4 million a month. Still a pittance when measured against the paper's larger circulation, but something to think about.

Augusta Chronicle to begin charging for some access

The Chronicle is one of the first of the area's larger papers to do it, but I expect to see more in the next year.

Gannett's paywalls

A low-key announcement buried in the business briefs of my local (McClatchy) paper this weekend alerted me to the impending pay wall going up at Gannett's Greenville News beginning Thursday.

It's an interesting experiment by Gannett that hasn't gotten the play I think it probably deserves -- and that's probably because everyone has long since tired of the pay wall debate. But this is one of the world's top media companies, and I suspect the paywalls going up in Greenville, Tallahassee and St. George, Utah. portend an experiment that not only Gannett, but also the entire industry, will be watching closely. (The announcement was followed in St. George by promises of a lot more great material in print online.)

As Steve Buttry rather acerbically points out - and right on target - each announcement buried the lede, telling people how much their paper spends to do great things for them instead of getting to the point that they would now have to pay a minimum of about $120 a year for basic online access. (I also find myself dryly wondering if the papers will leave those announcements up and out from behind the paywall.)

The Salt Lake City Tribune article that Buttry points to at least gets the important news in the lede - this is an experiment by Gannett, a seemingly desperate one from the sound of it, to figure out if some - any - kind of pay wall will work.

That Greenville was chosen makes sense to me. It's a midsized paper of nearly 100,000 circulation in a middle-class city with a stronger economy than most these days, an economy that also has an international flavor with the likes of BMW and Michelin.  Tallahassee, being a state capital town, has a similar if slightly different profile. I don't know enough about St. George to comment other than that it is a smaller paper in an isolated area, but from what I read it seem to have an above-average income and high online use.

Greenville allows Gannett to test this in a somewhat more competitive market. Along with two TV stations with robust news departments (a third station is in Asheville, N.C.), there is the nearby daily Herald-Journal of Spartanburg, a smaller but nonetheless substantial alternative source of news. It is a N.Y. Times regional paper that also has a smaller paper under its wing in Hendersonville, N.C. (about halfway to Asheville). While the Herald-Journal does not normally cover Greenville (25 miles to the east) regularly, it could conceivably look at doing more regional news. There also is the Greer Citizen, a smaller twice-weekly paper between the two cities that covers Greenville County.

In other words, there are plenty of alternative sources, but it's a smaller market so Gannett does not have to risk the potential of a "failure" that could bring more unwanted publicity it done at one of its larger papers, such as Indianapolis, Rochester or Phoenix (or in a major media area like White Plains, N.Y.).

(Greenville also has been a good place to experiment with other things. It was one of the first of Gannett's bigger papers to be almost entirely copy edited and designed elsewhere - Louisville, Ky.)

When he left Gannett earlier this year, the company's chief digital officer, Chris Saridakis, warned against paywalls implemented in the traditional ways, as this seems to be. He pushed for charging, but for specialized packaged delivered how the user wanted them.

Gannett is not known for being loquacious about its business, but I hope some information on the results of this do come out and with a bit more publicity than I've seen about the initial announcements. If these are successful, they could have a major impact on newspaper sites throughout the country because, as we know, other chains have never followed Gannett's lead ...

I thought this was an interesting observation from "Partisan62" in the comments to the Greenville story:

This so called business model is like charging us to enter the store to browse. How about charging for access to GN original content (like those wonderful sotries on the symphony or the phony writeups of local homes) and leaving the comments and forums free? We post our thoughts and generate that content (not GN) while we look over those great rollover ads and banners.

(Update 7/2): Checking the Greenville site, it appears the comments are remaining under free access.

A lot of the comments on all three sites basically come down to this - we're willing to put up with the ads to read what is there because it isn't all that compelling. Start charging, however, and the content doesn't measure up to the value.

Update thought: In recent years, AP bureaus have come to rely on newspaper and broadcast Web sites as a quick way to pick up stories throughout the day, instead of having to rely on the old, weirdly named "electronic carbons," which were direct feeds into AP's system from member computers. I wonder if Gannett will grant AP continued free access to the sites.
Update 7/2: Bill Mitchell's Poynter column on the experiment.

Worth reading - CSM's Yemma on what works

Worth taking your time to read is this thoughtful and enlightening piece on Paid Content from John Yemma, editor of the Christian Science Monitor, "Memo to News Sites: There is No Future in Digital Razzle Dazzle."

Yemma's take on much of multimedia:

Yes, people want multimedia. They want games, maps, 30 Rock on Hulu, bootlegged first-run movies from Pirate Bay, and whacked-out amateur videos on YouTube and a dozen other sites. But there’s no evidence that they want, for instance, a thoughtful interactive map/video/database mashup on Afghanistan or global warming on which they can comment. There’s no evidence that users love these things so much that they flock to them, stay around, and convert to a news site’s brand because of cool multimedia.

Yemma argues that paywalls won't work - he likens them to piling sandbags against a flood, but the digital waters never recede.

The answer he proposes is "relevant" content, but he goes on to acknowledge that's a lot harder than Google trends. It's content, he says, aimed at "influencers" who "live in narrow channels and respond to articles that make it clear why things matter and how problems are being solved."

The CSM, of course, has always been aimed at influencers, even when it was primarily print, and is quite a different organization from the South Succotash Gazette. Still, the everyman editors of the "Gazette" might consider relevance in terms of their local audience, too. The question is, can anything but a national or international publication truly make a business out of catering to that narrow wedge of "influencers"?

Yemma also has a good take on the challenges of all this:

What we’re learning is that the key to building and keeping traffic is far more prosaic than multimedia and sharing buttons. It rests on overcoming a huge cultural barrier: evolving a serious, experienced, thoughtful newsroom into an audience-first organization. I use the term “evolving” because this is all about the present tense. Trying to understand our current and future audience is a work in progress that will continue for as long as we publish on the web.

Boehne's take on paywalls

Rich Boehne, E.W. Scrripps' president and CE, has an interesting take on TV station Web sites and newspaper site pay walls in an interview with TVNewsCheck (italics mine):

There's a reasonable amount of potential and it's the same for the TV stations. TV stations have every bit the opportunity that the newspapers have and some would argue they have a better opportunity. Thus far, they have not taken advantage of that and in many markets they're well behind the newspapers. But they're catching up.

As strange as it sounds, we are focusing more and more on print and online as separate businesses and not the same. There's a place for print. Maybe it's not seven days a week, but there are a lot of people who want this information in a print format and we should serve that market and do an outstanding job. At the same time, we should build a separate online business. So the online piece is growing, but it's still nowhere near the size of the print piece.

On paywalls:

I don't think we've seen anything so far that works forlocal newspapers. Part of the issue is scale. You need quality content, but you also need enough scale to sell it to enough people to make a business. That's not easy to do in a small or midsize or even a decent-size newspaper market. The same is true for a TV station.

Newspapers terribly underestimate the ability of TV stations to produce content outside of their core audience. If newspapers attempt to take a lot of their local content and put it behind pay walls, I have no doubt that TV stations will rush in and fill the void. Now, I know we would certainly do that in all of our TV markets. So that just changed the equation a lot and the newspaper industry just for some reason overlooks the ability and determination that a lot of TV stations have.

Read the rest.

The disconnect over paywalls

You just wonder, some days, if anyone pays attention to the research being done about this business, especially online payments.

Some recent:

• Readers will consider micropayments - but only pennies, from the UK.
  
• News execs, readers split on how likely it is the readers will shift to print or pay online if paywalls are erected. Get the entire report at API. (David Sullivan takes a bit more sanguine view, arguing that even a 10 or 20 percent bump in usage of the paper would be a good thing.)
• Another survey of a few days ago says less than half of online readers would pay for content.

At least the draconian "we're going to put a moat up around everything" wave seems to have subsided. But I wonder how many publishers really have researched their communities to find out:

• What exactly is online, especially broadband, penetration?
• How many people say they turn to their cell phone for information?
• More important, what is the trend? How do your customers expect they will be getting their info in five or 10 years?
• And, of course, what are they willing to pay for it?

Too many publishers really don't have answers to those questions, and they're not up on the research.

AP to withhold some content from member sites?

The Nieman Lab, citing a confidential AP document, says the wire service is considering plans to hold back some content from member Web sites, instead directing users back to the AP's own site.

That would be an interesting turn of events and finally give flesh to the oft-voiced complaint from members these days that AP has become a competitor as well as a supplier. It would also mark a transition from wire service toward syndicate.

Having said that, I think there's a lot for publishers to think about in the AP's plan - namely that the wire service is struggling toward a definition of what truly is premium content. Too many publishers still think that just because it's "local" that it's worth lots of money.

I detect in the document, however, more of an orientation still toward WWMT (what would members think) about such content, not necessarily what would readers/users think. I'm not totally sold that an infographic is going to be seen by most people as primo content. (And, it should be noted, the document as revealed by Nieman so far does not say AP would put that behind a pay wall.) But then again, on the Web, it doesn't take many, and as I've said before, this is about aggregating rivulets, not necessarily even streams anymore, of revenue.

One of those commenting on the Nieman site brings up a good point -- if AP has links in its stories that link back to that "unique" content on its Web site, and if clicks flow to the AP that way, and if AP then sells ads against that, will it split the revenue with the referring sites?