In 2014 when I wrote this post, little did I now it was foreshadowing not just the end of WSJ in print, but the death of print altogether. Here’s an update.
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Why did the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) want me to cancel my print subscription? When I cancelled it in 2014 after 25 years, it wasn’t because I no longer enjoy reading the print edition, but because of the way it has been delivered to me since January. Saturday’s delivery was the final straw.
When I arrived that morning at the office to pick up a few things for the weekend, I looked for the Journal in its familiar plastic bag. When I saw it, it looked thin. Then I noticed papers strewn throughout the parking lot. I thought, “They might have picked up the garbage, and the wind had blown some of the garbage out.” It happens. But when I picked up the Journal, a sinking feeling came over me: I knew instantly that it was my Journal that was blowing all over the place – and I mean all over. In the water puddles, snow banks, bare trees. Everywhere. “How the heck did this happen,” I asked myself? I mean, the advertising was still in the plastic bag, but the Journal itself was gone – blowing everywhere. I felt like Chevy Chase in the movie Funny Farm, where it was a mail delivery problem.
Since January, we’ve been calling WSJ about delivery issues. I’m not going to go into them, but when we finally got them to go to the right door with the paper, we’d find it everywhere except by the door – in the flower bed full of snow, near a window 10 feet away from the door. Then this happened on Saturday. And remember: this is after years of really good service. Something had changed.
Now, WSJ would not give us the name of the delivery person or method to contact them, because I wouldn’t mind having a chat. Sometimes rational discussion (and a few bucks) helps. So, I really had no choice and issued the order to cancel the print and keep the digital.
The question is, does the WSJ want me to move away from print into the digital world?
When I asked that in 2014, I knew and wrote about a lot of discussion about print and digital publishing Even NYT Publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. says print is going to be around longer than desktop. But if WSJ did want to kill print (or foresaw the end of it), I can think of ways to do it rather than hiring yahoos to frustrate its customer base.
Of course, it could be me. It’s not like this has happened to anyone else – or has it? We think when something happens to us that it only happens to us. But if you’ve been around long enough, you realize that if it happens to you, it’s probably happening to others. The real question is, why?
I wish I knew. I loved WSJ in print. I loved to browse it and let the stories and headlines guide my weekend reading. I never read with a purpose, except to learn. That’s really the best reading sometimes. I will try to do that digitally, but it will not be the same. You see, that’s really the difference between print and digital: print is real. You can touch it, feel it — even in the snow.
The other real difference is that when you read digitally, it is generally with a purpose: you put something in the Google search bar and depend on Google to give you results. And while the same can be said of editors who edit the WSJ for news content, the reading is really reversed. Dan Okrent makes the arguments in his essay, The Death of Print? Okrent, who knows about such things since he was named Time Inc. Editor-at-Large in March 1999, makes compelling arguments that factor into your thinking about the end of print.
For those interested in a deeper dive, there’s The Death of Print? The Challenges and Opportunities facing the Print Media on the Web, a 96-page paper written by Kimmo Lundén as a Reuters Institute Fellowship Paper, University of Oxford. This heavily researched paper (including interviews) concludes “Newspapers are Not Dead.” However, when is the last time you purchased a print newspaper?
I rest my case.
One upside to this death (there’s always an upside even in death if you can figure it out) is that the delivery person can’t throw pixels around the parking lot. Or can he? Sometimes it feels like there’s a lot of pixel throwing going on these days! Maybe some things really don’t change! What do you think? Let me hear form you.
Glad someone addressed this. Reading the printed version allows for exploration and in my opinion greater control to move in any direction that my minds chooses. Looking at a screen for leisure reading can add up to eye fatigue. No matter how great the device. I am not fully convinced they did enough research on their audience who prefer print. Canadians still like to read the paper on weekends and catch up on the weeks’ happenings.
Thanks for the comment, Nick…there’s something about reading a printed page, isn’t there?
Our carrier had to retire from the job. He had delivered the local paper and the WSJ. So both the local paper and the WSJ ended up having to be mailed to me. Sometimes I get them on the correct day. Sometimes I get them a day or two later or not at all. Anybody have similar problems and determine if it is the post office or the WSJ distributor???
Thanks for the comment, Mark. That’s probably an excellent question, and don’t know if we will ever find out which is which. Good luck!
I found this article looking to see if I was alone. I’m not sure if I’m relieved or disappointed that I’m not. I haven’t received a print edition since mid July 2022. I just made another call, and, like many of you, was assured the it was urgent, they were sorry, and it would get resolved. As I do each time I call. For 9 months now. I’m ready to give up, but I keep holding out hope that ‘this time’ it will actually get resolved, because – again like many of you – I’m a print gal. Why do they seem so cavalier about their base??
Thanks for the comment, Jacquelyn. They probably do care, but their base is so big, well, they can’t handle it. I wrote another blog addressing that https://interlinegroup.com/mix/powerlessness-why-organizations-fail-at-customer-service/ Good luck.
We’ve had a similar issue in the past two weeks. We switched our delivery address for weekly plus Saturday and for some odd reason, the Saturday paper is always delivered but we have as of yet to have the M-F paper delivered. I’ve called daily and get the same response: We will email your carrier and list this as urgent. When I ask if I can get the contact for the carrier, they say they don’t have it. And, when I ask how do they know if the messages are getting through to the carrier, they have no answer. I asked for a supervisor on my last three calls and get the run-around. I am so aggravated with them, it truly feels like they don’t care if we get the paper or if we cancel, etc. What happened to REAL customer service?
Cathy, thank you for your comment. What DID happen to customer service? If you Google “powerlessness in customer service” you’ll see another blog I wrote (true story). We in the middle of a major research project on this topic, and when we finish, I’ll hopefully get some answers. I’ll share the non-proprietary ones, and am writing another post where I experienced superior customer service — one from Amazon over a $22 product, and one from T-mobile over a $50 product. I couldn’t believe how smoothly they went, and talked to the person’s supervisors. You could hear the surprise in the supervisor’s voices. I asked one, “You thought this was another complaint, didn’t you?” She sighed and smiled, saying, “You have no idea. Thank you so much.” The good news is these experiences keep us focused on the companies that DO get it! Enjoy your day.
This article said it perfectly – I finally canceled my daily WSJ that I also used to love because when I complained about fairly regular delivery issues, the delivery actually stopped completely! Apparently, the delivery person was not a fan of my mentioning to his/her employers that the job was being done to less than par. I even started up the weekend WSJ again because I missed it so much. This also was a failure to deliver for three weeks. I’m not sure why WSJ has a hard time getting a qualified delivery company/person. They could even crowd source it with an app and people would work in the gig economy and do a better job. It’s a great product, just a major failure in a critical part of the value chain of the business – the supply. The customer service center is off-shored and they will not do more than just contract the delivery company. They really need to fire them. Beyond disappointing.
Saturday print edition used to be delivered on Saturday now switched to Sunday at the local delivery outfit discretion. Nobody likes it and WSJ cares more about the local delivery companies than yheir customers / subscribers !!!
I’ve enjoyed receiving the print edition for more than 25 years – usually picking up my copy from my driveway around 6:30 AM. I had delivery issues maybe twice a year – meaning no newspaper was delivered. In the last year, the frequency of delivery problems increased – and now it seems like it happens two or three times a month. It’s happened twice this week, although on Tuesday I got both the Monday and Tuesday issues.
Steve, thanks for the comment…I guess I was the early warning system. I know companies can’t control everything, including their distribution channels. But oddly, I’ve gravitated to the online version and can’t say I’m missing the print much anymore. The decline of print is happening across all trades, especially our B2B world. Sad, but true. Thanks again for commeting.
Hey Jim – I’ll save some of my remarks about print and digital for another place. But about newspapers: I’ve always preferred print over digital because the reading experience is different. It’s leisurely, and I find myself reading stories I would likely skip in a digital format. That makes me feel more well-rounded and informed.
I was a newspaper carrier when I was a kid – back when papers had more heft to them, thanks to all of the ads and content. I always made sure to respond to customers about where and how their paper was delivered. So there’s something very wrong with WSJ’s system … and that’s a real shame.
Thanks, Paul. Like you, I’m a print guy, but that urge publishers are having to abandon print is a real shame. Thanks for your tomment!