That old age print media is going to continue to struggle is that they are just lousy marketers. Lousy, lousy, lousy. Or, as Bart Simpson would say – "You suck!"
I’ve subscribed to the Wall Street Journal for years – print and online. Suddenly, looking for my daily dose, I’m offline. Seems when I resubscribed back in January I only did it for print – not the combo offer. Why they wouldn’t automatically upgrade both is beyond me – why downgrade an existing subscriber? I thought I was just continuing my subscription…
Having encountered the virtually unintelligible "you can’t come here anymore screen" I called. And waited. And waited. The person I was talking to for ten minutes – who needed all the skills of a CSI Investigator to figure out what was going on then said I needed to speak to the print department. Although my problem was with online access it really wasn’t an online problem. So, over the the print department… We finally sorted this out.
People, get with the program. How about getting rid of your stupid voice response systems and multiple call centers. How about putting the customer first. How about removing complexity. Simplicity saves you money and makes customers happy.
Andy, my take is that the WSJ has been too busy, and frankly spending too much money this past year, promoting their new weekend edition. No one is there to worry about us little people who have dropped their subscriptions. Somebody somewhere at the top of that organization believes their new print vehicle is where they will generate real (ad) dollars and profits in the coming decade. They may be right – what’s the math here? For each single full page ad sold, they’d need to sell 2,500 annual online subscriptions????