NewsBeat

July 2023 NewsBeat 20 NewsBeat A NEWSLETTER FOR NEW YORK'S COMMUNITY NEWSPAPERS Published by the New York Press Association 621 Columbia Street Extension, Suite 100, Cohoes, NY 12047 518.464.6483 • 518.464.6489 fax • www.nynewspapers.com Executive Editor — Michelle K. Rea Layout & Design — Rich Hotaling PA NY Display Advertising Sizes and Standard Box 4.5"w x 3.25"h $300 Horizontal 9.25"w x 3.25"h $500 Vertical 4.5"w x 10.25"h $750 Full Page 9.25"w x 10.25"h $1,000 By ROB TORNOE Easy to pay, hard to quit. Publishers under fire for subscription cancellation hassles I t's incredibly easy to pay for news, but sometimes it can be impossibly difficult to stop. Recently, I traveled to Arizona to cover the Super Bowl. While there, it was neces- sary for me to sign up for digital subscrip- tions to a handful of news outlets to aid my reporting. In most cases, I really only need- ed to read a single story behind a paywall, but the only option was to pay for a digital subscription with a teaser rate that would balloon in a couple of months. A few weeks later, back home and not needing access to local news from locations hundreds of miles away, I set about can- celing the subscriptions before the rates increased. Most were relatively painless to stop — some let me cancel with a few clicks, while others took an online chat with an agent. But one newspaper — The Dallas Morn- ing News — made it such a headache to cancel that it changed how I'll approach signing up for subscriptions to access digi- tal news moving forward. It didn't need to be that hard. The news- paper offered a host of options on its account page, including updating my name and email address, changing my password and updating my personal information. But there was no option to simply cancel my account and no online chatbot or cus- tomer service representative to chat with digitally. I couldn't even email customer service to cancel my account. Instead, I had to search through their frequently asked questions, where I discov- ered the only option was to call a customer service representative. After navigating an automated answer- ing system (canceling your account was on a second list of options), I waited sev- eral minutes on hold before I was finally connected to a human being. The repre- sentative was polite but relentless in her attempts to keep me a paying subscriber, despite my explaining I'm an out-of-town journalist who only wanted to read one story. All told it took me about 20 minutes and a lot of unnecessary frustration to can- cel a subscription that ultimately cost me just $1. The Dallas Morning News did not respond to a request for comment for this story. Charles Jun, the operations manager at the nonprofit Lenfest Institute for Journal- ism (which owns The Philadelphia Inquirer, where I work), had a similar experience recently. Jun was tasked with canceling 22 digital newspaper subscriptions the organi- zation had subscribed to for a report they didn't end up pursuing. Jun wrote about his experience for Len- fest's Solution Set newsletter, and like me, he discovered many of the subscriptions were easy to cancel. But he called a handful of cases "infuriating" for creating processes that seemed intentionally difficult to navi- gate or follow through on. "I almost lost my mind a few times," Jun said. Churn is churn One of the most difficult was The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, which Jun said offered digital subscribers a host of options — in- cluding sharing subscriptions — but didn't offer any information on how to cancel a subscription. "You would think that if you can share a subscription [on their website], you could cancel a subscription," Jun said. "Or they would at least put some type of a note saying, 'Well, here's how you cancel.' But there's absolutely nothing like that." It's easy to understand why some news

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