I replaced my fairly curated (/r/neutralpolitics, /r/neutralnews etc) Reddit morning news with NYT about a month ago. It's completely changed my morning routine. I feel much more "holistically" informed, and I feel calmer since the news are significantly more nuanced than what makes it to the top of organic news sites.<p>The "morning briefing", which gives me a brief summary of key news items to go with my morning coffee, alone would have been worth the $3.75 a week.<p>Had none of the issues OP notes on getting an annual subscription - and at the NYT price point, I'm ashamed it took me this long to pay for good journalism.<p>Independent of what rag you support, if you don't currently pay for journalistic work, please consider doing so. The dollar figures are minimal and constitute a tremendous boost for the Fourth Estate.<p><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/subscriptions/Multiproduct/lp8U939.html?campaignId=6KQ4R&gclid=CIuEt_21kNICFQaVfgodz2oNQw" rel="nofollow">https://www.nytimes.com/subscriptions/Multiproduct/lp8U939.h...</a>
> You have to sit through an online chat session which takes longer than it should. Apparently you’re not allowed to cancel your subscription until you answer the question, how is your day going?<p>This right here is why PayPal won online payments. They're extremely consumer friendly. One button cancellation, no fucking around. I don't even bother going to sites any more, I just open PayPal and hit cancel.<p>I basically won't work with anything that's not PayPal or Bitcoin these days due to hassles like this.<p>Out of curiosity, does anyone have any experience getting their credit card company to cancel all future payments to a company? Is this easy to do?
It is bizarre that we don't have any consumer protection law around requiring an option for online cancellation for subscriptions that offer online purchases.<p>edit: spelling ;-)
Ted and jakewins both advocate subscribing to support newspapers and journalism.<p>I absolutely agree that quality journalism is essential and should be paid for. But aim higher: In addition to subscribing, try to find a funding method that actually will work in the long run. Specifications, in no order:<p>A) Journalists have sufficient funds to do quality work, earn a decent living, and attract talented, dedicated people to the profession.<p>B) Journalists can speak truth to power and to an angry Internet mob. They are free from influence by their funders, to a great degree.<p>C) The quality work is as widely distributed as possible. This is essential: If only subscribers can read it, then only tiny portion of the online world can benefit and it's not part of the public conversation. Instead of the Internet dream (very achievable) of distributing valuable content effortlessly, we're back to the old days of it being available only to a few subscribers and everyone else subsists on 'fake news'.<p>It's a question that's been asked many times, but so far nobody has solved it (and specification C is usually ignored).
I loved the content in the Journal but unfortunately I was put off by their sneaky behaviour when they charged my card for the next month's subscription after the free month. Granted I should've set an alert but, they could've at least informed me once before it expired.<p>To then cancel it, I had to make a call and stay on it for half hour. I still can't figure out who's coming with these hackneyed marketing "solutions" at media houses.
Best line: "First, I’ll note that I have a pretty much unlimited media budget. If I can afford to spend a hundred dollars per month poisoning myself with tequila, I can spend that much on information."
<i>> Zero newspapers allow you to change subscription term online. It’s 2017 and newspapers haven’t figured out web forms with radio buttons.</i><p>Newspapers all have digital departments, yet you can only cancel your subscription by calling a phone number...
With all the talk of these businesses struggling, and their supposed focus on moving into the future, I would be a pretty upset shareholder to find out that they have the user experience this...wrong?!<p>Although honestly, not shocked by anything here.
The first thing I do whenever I subscribe to a service these days is research how difficult it is to unsubscribe from it. I was tempted to get Sunday delivery for some of those newspapers in the article but realized that it would be tough to get out of them.<p>I think this type of interaction might make sense for a different type of customer. I imagine people who are getting the physical version of a newspaper might be older or less tech-savvy so the "bad old way" of waiting in a call center queue on hold might be what they are expecting instead of a fancy complicated web interface.
Okay, this is a good look into the payment systems of all three, but I feel like judging them solely by that and not by the content of the actual paper is probably not the right metric to use here.
This guy's approach reminds me of why I ended up with Dish instead of DirecTV. Dish was the one that lets me DOWNGRADE my service without forcing me to pick up the phone. Cancel HBO? Just click!
Did you try blendle.com? They launched a beta product in the US and with 1 account you can read multiple US newspapers.<p>But already have there product wide available in Netherlands and Germany
He's lucky he didn't try to subscribe to a local Hearst paper.<p>I subscribed because I like the paper and the newsstand in my building closed. But the process is bizarre -- They only let you subscribe in weird increments of weeks vs. months. Then you get what they call "bonus" weeks, but the outcome is that the billing system ends up double-billing you for up to one week, and you can't predict when the bills will come.