Adventures in Subscribing to the Digital News Journal
So the NJ has put up their paywall, and you are limited to 5 articles (per week? per month?) and they helpfully count down the number of free articles you have left in a box in the lower right hand of your screen every time you click on a new article. I waited until the paywall finally went into effect to sign up (for the record, I actually buy this paper every day I am in town) and preserve my access to online articles. I’ve tried subscribing twice online and finally called today to figure out why I still can’t get the NJ online.
I initially registered on February 23rd. The NJ gives you an online subscription option, and I clicked on the Get Started button. After filling out all of the info (at first I tried to subscribe using my Facebook login, which hung up my computer), giving hem my credit card number and hitting next, I got a screen that just had this swirly circle — the kind that lets you know that something is supposed to be working. The screen didn’t change after a few minutes, and I walked away to talk to someone in another office. Got back in 10 or 15 minutes, and the swirly thing was still working. I needed my computer back, so just shut down that tab and went about my business. I tried again later in case I had just hit a bad patch and got a message saying that this account had already been created. What I didn’t have was an email notice of subscription or a way to sign in.
Today I had a chance to actually call the Customer Service number. After listening to the automated routing messages, I did get to a person who took the same information I gave to the online subscription process. Once she got to asking me what my email was, I asked her why she didn’t have this — after all, I had already given all of this information on line while trying to subscribe. The lady I spoke to was very nice and very patient (I was clearly NOT the first person she was hearing this from) — she had to be, every time she tried to explain how this was working, I had more questions — and what it came down to is that while you can go through the process online, you still have to call this subscription center to get your record activated. I asked her why this isn’t anywhere on the website — as in once they’ve taken your credit card number, why not tell people to now get on the phone to activate? The person helping me didn’t know and why should she? She didn’t create this thing.
This doesn’t make sense to me, really, but perhaps this passes muster with folks who don’t order stuff or subscribe to anything via their computers. But I did check my credit card and apparently the NJ did take my credit card number AND they charged for the partial month. The partial month that I didn’t have access to the online version of the paper. After all of this effort, the NJ has all of my info and my email and it takes 24 hours for the system to update — then I should get my online access.
Really? What a clusterfuck this is. It would have been lots easier to share the subscription of a friend who gets the paper delivered. But there isn’t much in this process that provides any evidence that the NJ is planning on delivering any better value. There is just No Way that here in 2012 that there should be a hangup this big in taking your money and providing goods or subscriptions. Crazy — and not in a good way. It just feels like I’m being penalized for trying to do the right thing. And again, I the person on the other end of the phone wan’t responsible for this — she is passing on the info she had.
Alternately, there is no such angst in supporting the newsworks.org fundraising effort. Quick, easy, secure — which is the hallmark of people who are going to respect your financial support. Plus Newsworks is good, and has a Delaware section.
Digiday has a piece on the Gannett paywall gamble. Notwithstanding the incompetence in actually subscribing online, it will be interesting to see how this works locally. The NYTimes online subscription (plus smartphone access) is $15.00/month so it looks to me like one of these papers is not priced appropriately. Plus, the NYT provides permalinks to their stuff — so if you are emailing or blogging or talking about a news event via Facebook, the NYT stays in the conversation without dinging your subscription or paywall limits.
So tomorrow ought to be the day I actually get my online NJ. I’ll be back to report on that. In the meantime, I did ask them to refund the partial month I never had access to — and was offered two free weeks this month. We’ll see.
Anyone else have any issues in signing up for the digital version of the NJ?
Tags: News Journal, The News Journal
Cassandra, I just canceled my print subscription (Sundays only)/online access because of the horrid Ipad edition of the paper. When I called customer service to cancel, I got the feeling that when I told them I wasn’t interested in giving any money to anyone who can’t put out a decent online Ipad newspaper (and there are plenty that do) that it wasn’t the first time they’ve heard that. I’d probably sign up for a weekend edition of paper only, but there is no way I’m paying for their crappy tablet edition of the paper..
We get the dead tree so I added the digital version. And even though I check the box “keep me signed in on this computer” they never keep me signed in. I end up getting my free article countdown warning and the option to sign in. Firefox offered to remember my sign in info, love that!, but the News Journal site won’t accept that either. So it’s log in every time.
Who’s designing this stuff? I feel like I’m back in the time of dial up internet.
😆
Dial-up internet! Maybe my problem was not waiting for that crazy connect scream.
One other thing — the first news source I ever subscribed to online was Salon.com. They took my money, kept my original registration (as in I didn’t have to change any user info) and made sure the site was ad-free for me without a hitch. That was years ago. People have figured out how to do this online thing ages ago. I’m thinking the NJ probably needs to charge the kid’s meal price until they get themselves ready to serve up the adult meal.
They might have better success if they hired the kid to set up their online service.
What everybody else said and worse……. I am ashamed of myself for buying it
I’ve given up after a dozen tries on-line and two phone calls. It apparently isn’t supposed to happen for me. Dunno what I’m going to do for local news because I just hate the dead-tree edition during the week — hauling down the drive to get it and then hauling it out to the recycle. I get the Sunday delivery so Mom can have the TV section but I used to read it on-line and dump the rest of the paper in the recyle. I guess I’ll be relying on DL and WDEL’s website to find out what’s happening in Delaware. Too bad. I’d pay the $15/mo if I could.
It took me three days of calling customer service to finally find out they spelled my name wrong on their records. I think it’s finally fixed.
Here is the complete story told in one graph.
Print ad revenues are at a 60 year low.
I’m a subscriber and took the time to activate my online access. Only, I can’t figure out why I can’t access DelawareOnline from my work desktop. I’m a state employee and I’ve always had access to news sites as part of my job. If I have a personal subscription, I should be able to access the online version from anywhere by simply logging in, right? Apparently not so. I can’t even access the screen to enter my log in information. The screen blacks out. I’m told there’s some sort of issue that doesn’t allow multiple users to access DelawareOnline if they are from the same office/ building. Does that make sense? Anyway, I’m frustrated.
still reading it every day for free…
Nikki could the problem be the state computer system? It does limit access to certain things, maybe delawareonline’s sign on page is getting weeded out. Nice to see you on a blog, BTW, blogging is good for the soul. 🙂
“Really? What a clusterfuck this is.” = CANCELED TODAY!
Nikki, I can access delawareonline from my DHSS office, but Patrick Jackson said he’s been talking to someone at TNJ to get multiple sign-ons in his state office. We had trouble at home with someone poaching our wireless connection and signing into delawareonline, but I got that problem solved. I need my Delaware news and TNJ is the single best source for it, hands down.
Apparently they don’t need you all, or me as customers. Excuse my french , but eff em. Wdel online has all the local news I need.
NJ will be gone in a year…
If you’re looking for alternate news sources, pay attention to Delaware First Media — http://www.delawarefirst.org
They’ve got a solid management team, with lots of veterans of the late WHYY Delaware News Tonight and a collection of knowledgeable freelance writers with strong print and broadcast experience.
And where does a large chunk of WDEL’s news come from? They have three news people, by my count, producing a very limited number of stories. The rest of their copy comes from the Associated Press broadcast wire, which runs short-clip versions of stories picked up from other papers – like the News Journal.
I’m no apologist for TNJ, but I will say this. There was one media outlet that exposed the DelDOT land deals, and it wasn’t Delaware First Media. There was one media outlet that dug into Earl Bradley’s past and documented how the system failed, and it wasn’t WDEL. There was one media outlet that broke the Sussex sheriff situation, and it wasn’t the Cape Gazette. There was one media outlet that exposed Christine O’Donnell’s situation, and it wasn’t WHYY. There was one media outlet that held regulators’ feet to the fire about the Blue Cross fiasco, and it wasn’t the Delaware State News.
Those smaller publications are great at providing purely local news (city council meetings, zoning hearings, a new restaurant opening up in Smyrna) and tossing up traffic alerts and pasting press releases from the cops on their sites. If that’s all you want, fine. But they’re one-, two- or five-person operations. The smaller papers take in young reporters fresh out of college, train them for a year or two, and then wave goodbye as they leave for greener pastures or public relations. None have the staffing, subject matter expertise or depth of knowledge that TNJ has. Is it perfect? No. But no one media outlet is going to give you everything that you want.
You pay for a subscription to Smithsonian, Wired or National Geographic because you recognize that it costs money to report on important topics. The same applies to stories here in Delaware. Just because you’ve gotten the news free for the last dozen years doesn’t mean it’s worth nothing.
Remember: You get what you pay for.
I’m not going to diss the NJ for depth and breadth of coverage. Overall, they’re bigger and better than anything else we’ve got in Delaware — but the NJ has shrunk so much that it’s not the dominant force in the market that it was 10-15 years ago.
(They’re doing a telephone marketing survey now — and when they called last night, I gave them high grades on most coverage areas)
With all its cutbacks, there’s less news now in the NJ (there used to be five stories on the front page and the local front most days; now there are four and a collection of blurbs telling you what’s inside).
And, of course, there’s no way of knowing what you’re missing. That’s why we go to DL for El Som’s political analysis and Pandora’s digging into Red Clay’s dubious but successful referendum cammpaign, or to Grapevine to find out what du Pont and Castle and the other GOP geezers (not our Geezer) are up to.
But the bottom line with the NJ remains: they’re better than the rest, but hardly what they once were, and their future will never match their past.
The New York Times lets me read what I want on their website for free. I’m not paying to access the News Journal’s site.
There’s definitely good work that TNJ does, and in many ways, some of the signature work they’ve done recently highlights some of what they don’t cover. And don’t get me started on their editorial board. But my entire beef here is about launching an effort to get people to pay for their online content when they clearly were not ready for that launch. I’m told by an anonymous tipster that certainly most of the decisions about this paywall business are made above the pay grade of the local NJ people (and that the number of free articles/month is in a test phase — we have 5 per and other papers have more), so it is hard to be too tough on these folks. But I feel like a complete idiot for trying to step up and pay for this stuff when the vendor isn’t ready to even take your money.
As a former long time reader of the Washington Post (which also has gone downhill), I took a look at the NJ when I moved to Delaware. I could not believe the price they charge out the newspaper box for the relatively slim pickings contained in the paper. Of course low cost is not necessarily best value, but I am still left wondering where the beef is.
Why pay $15 to look at a field of advertisments interupted by the occasional factually mangled news article?
And remember – even if you pay for the subscription, articles STILL disappear behind yet another paywall after 30 days (archive paywall). So all you are really paying for is a 30-day window of access.
Que Pasa makes an excellent point. ( I can’t believe I just typed that.)
All,
I have carefully read all of your comments and hear your frustrations loud and clear. As you all know, change is not always easy to digest nor is it easy to implement. I speak on behalf of The News Journal when I say we appreciate your understanding and patience. Still, your issues are very concerning, and I will do whatever I can to rectify the situation. Please email me directly at hnorton@delawareonline.com or call me at 324-7729 and I will do what it takes to help you through this. We are committed to delivering hyper-local news to our community 24/7, and these technical issues must be addressed.
Holly Norton
Community Engagement Editor
The News Journal Media Group
Holly, please address Pucks comment. Do I have to buy content twice? Please address inconsistency of access across browsera, Explorer, firefox, chrome, etc. Your site is beyond buggy, just sayin’
Subscribed last Friday. Took 5 days to get online access, still have not received an actual paper. Emailed customer service and got a reply that began, “thank you for contacting Florida Today.”
We actually tried to subscribe to the dead tree edition, and they failed miserably to deliver, so I have low expectations for their online version. One irony is that they keep sending spam e-mails, and in order to unsubscribe, you first have to establish an account.
WTF?
Jason, TY…sometimes we can agree
Dearest Holly:
Forgive me for not responding directly. But this is how we roll.
You’ve heard the complaints. What is at stake is the future of your business…
How to win…..
You need to market yourself as the go-to place in Delaware for any type of commercial activity. If I need a plumber; If I need an electrician; If I need an emergency oil delivery; If I need a lawyer; you need me to come over to your site and browse through your adds and while there, find the one I like.
In the old days, it was called the yellow pages, and anytime I needed something either through business or at home, that was the first thing I picked up….
The nice thing about that old concept, was that if I needed to find Ms. Robinson’s (from the Graduatephone number in the white pages, I didn’t have to look at your ads. I looked under R tab, then flipped to the page that said Rob- Rod, then followed the alphabet until I got to Robinson, Ms. (hey, hey, hey, hey, hey,hey)
I understand that coming from a news business, this may not be how your team’s platform thinks. Your platform is a printed newspaper with ads that are slipped onto a page so as a reader looks over an article, he casually sees the ads on the page.
That is passive or subtle method of providing advertisement. The reader doesn’t have to look if he doesn’t want to…. You probably sold more papers as well as more advertising when that was the case.
In today’s electronic medium, all unsolicited adds are rudely offensive. If one is concentrating on fighting through a sentence and that sentence disappears, it causes a very strong emotion to be elicited in that reader. A string or series of strong emotions, leaves a very serious scar. A cat o’nine tails versus a paper cut. It appears that the emotional damage from all those scars, is making itself manifest overwhelmingly on this thread… 🙂
So how can you fix it? First it is important for us that you do. We (State of Delaware) need someone who is independently paid to walk into to legislative hall and (being beholden to no one but us-people), poke around and tell us exactly what is going on… (hence the motivation for me to point out the direction that would be most helpful for you) That’s our need.
Your need, is to make enough money so you still have jobs… That is a very powerful need.
I think we can work together.
Give us a format where we can (at one glance) see all your headlines from that day’s stories….
Remember that in todays world the only reason we are visiting you at all, instead of a major search engine, IS to get information that pertains to us here… Local Delaware News… Give us more of it… Let us know that the new WaWa is opening on March 11th. Let us know that a demonstration against AutoZone for supporting Rush’s view against women, took place here in Delaware. Let us know that the Children’s Museum is really a cool place, especially if you have kids, and that bang for the buck, it is better than the positives of the Smithsonian, deducted by the minuses of travel there and back…..
And categorize your ads… so if I need a plumber, I can see all those who put their ads with you, even click on a video if they provided one… Give them a chance to really sell me… And the only reason why I’m looking at your site and not someone elses? Is because while I’m browsing through your ads, a feeder across the screen alerts me to every local news item that took place today … The exact opposite of the approach being taken now.(while looking for ads/ getting news; as opposed to looking for news/ getting ads.)
So, there it is, marketing 101 without the focus group 🙁 … It is definitely something to chew on…. But better move fast. Others are reading this too, and going…. hmmmmmmmm…….
stranger things have happened….
Thanks, Holly, for taking the time to respond here. I have finally gotten my login to work (it took some password resets and some patience) and have been looking at the online version of the paper. Interesting that you would want to reinvent the paper itself online (preserving all of the ads and paid content), when the website itself is still pretty kludgy. But this will be a work in progress too — I was looking at a Dialogue Delaware piece in the facsimile paper that hasn’t gotten to delawareonline yet about Dennis Williams and his city taxes — the link above this piece that sends you to Dialogue Delaware is quite broken and even then that section hasn’t been updated online for awhile.
Cassandra,
Thanks for your understanding. I’m happy to hear that your login works. As for your question about Dialogue Delaware: That’s a timely thought. The reporter who populated that blog has since left (two weeks ago) and his replacement Jonathan Starkey and I were just speaking about getting the blog back in order. In fact, we’re taking a strategic look at how we present all of our blogs.
If there is anything else specific that you or anyone on Delaware Liberal has a question about concerning their account etc., please email me at hnorton@delawareonline.com and I’ll get you to the right person. We are in week two of our new subscription model rollout and bugs are being worked at as we learn about them. The more specific your feedback, the better we can resolve your issues.
Thanks again for reading!
Holly Norton
Community Engagement Editor
The News Journal Media Group
hnorton@delawareonline.com
324-7729