![]() Instead, you remind me, “our subscribers have full electronic access to our digital offerings that are included as part of their subscription. These excuses, surprisingly, have nothing to do with the expected and unmentioned reason of the ongoing expense of covering news. But now you claim it costs too much to give me credit, since you say it’s expensive to enforce stops and starts with carriers, and many sections of the paper “are ordered 30 days in advance” (I trust those are your non-news sections). I can still put a hold on paper delivery. By “changed,” of course, you meant “eliminated.” But in February 2013, the Times “changed the vacation credit policy” as it noted in an email. As many other newspapers did and still do, you used to allow me to stop physical paper delivery for vacations and receive credit (or to “donate” the papers to local schools for educational purposes, presumably building papier-mâché models). Yes: Comcast beats you for bill clarity.ĭisappearing vacation stop credits. To put this into perspective, Comcast has more descriptive and more complete web billing. I gave up and switched back to paper bills. Several customer service phone calls and emails later, your official word was, “At this time those details you are looking for are not available online or with e-billing.” I was told I’d have to call in or send email every time I received a bill to get baseline information that was on every paper bill, as this was considered an “advanced billing feature.” No additional information to tell me when the subscription ended, or if the rate had changed (it sometimes does). Where’s the billing period? What’s the rate? I clicked through to the website. Then the first email bills arrived, listing only the amount due and due date. Wanting to oxymoronically save a few trees when paying for my print subscription, I signed up for the MyTimes Subscriber Services website and email billing. Inability to get full bill details electronically. The Seattle Times clearly doesn’t get that a huge part of the digital attraction of news that one pays for isn’t just a high level of journalism, it’s the entire subscriber experience.Īt the Seattle Times – a Pulitizer-Prize winning, major metropolitan news organization – that digital subscriber experience runs the gamut from the startlingly mediocre to the outright sucky. I might overlook this as an oversight, or as a misguided attempt to not scare away print subscribers, if it wasn’t for the evidence that your digital disconnect goes beyond wording. However, she never mentioned the words “digital,” mobile,” or – perhaps because it’s ink-stained heresy – “online first” or “online only.” Why do I have doubts about your ability to be e-literate? In the e-update, Editor Kathy Best used the word “online” once (albeit in lockstep with “and in print”).
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