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March 19, 2024

Poor Circulation: Are Newspapers Ready for Tablet's Prime Time?

The tablet era is upon us, playing out as maybe the last big chance for newspaper companies. By mid-2011, tens of Americans will be tabletizing, as some ready themselves to move to tablet reading of news — and newspapers — and away from that old habit of print.

But are those readers, once again, ahead of publishers? Behind the scenes, I see increasing urgency among daily news publishers to get their products on the tablet, though the movement is less urgent and less creative than it needs to be. For the moment, though, put aside product and platform issues. Let’s consider something more basic: knowing customers.

After all this is the age that marketers are beginning to know everything instantly about us, their customers. Whether it is marketers tracking each breadcrumb of our digital lives (good, two-parter by Marketplace’s Stacey Vanek Smith) or giant vending machines looking at us (and determining age and gender) as we look at them, this is the age of customer identification, assessment, and, ultimately, satisfaction.

So against that backdrop, let me offer a cautionary tale about the newspaper industry’s readiness.

It’s just a little driveway story, but we can connect it directly to the digital age.

We recently moved to the Santa Cruz area, from San Jose. I may be a print-to-digital news analyst, but I’m still a baby boomer, one eye on each world of print and online. So I wanted to get the local paper delivered.

I had called the Mercury News to cancel our San Jose subscription several months back and was surprised that no attempt was made to offer me the Santa Cruz Sentinel, the main daily in my new hometown, though both papers are owned by MediaNews. That was curious, but unsurprising from what I’d remembered of circulation operations back in the days when I was in the newsroom.

Then, one Sunday ago, I ran into a Sentinel booth at a local free jazz fair in the park. The retiree from North Carolina manning the booth wasn’t exactly doing a brisk business, so I sauntered over. We had a nice conversation; he gave me his Carolina-informed tout on who had the best BBQ at the adjacent food booths. I asked him for the best deal he could give me, exchanged a credit card, getting a little discount for two months.

“When will I get my first issue?” I asked.

“Around Wednesday.”

The “around” part would seem odd for most other purchases, but given what I knew about newspaper delivery, didn’t give me pause.

Wednesday, Thursday and Friday came and went with no paper delivered. On Saturday, with no delivery, I called “Subscriber Services,” finding the number on the website, since the “Santa Cruz Sentinel Subscription Order Form,” I’d been given at the fair contained all my personal information, but none about the Sentinel.

I told the customer rep the problem.

“What’s your address?,” he asked, reminding me that newspapers have long identified customers by address rather than name. That may be okay if you’re in the UPS business, making occasional deliveries, but when your customer is an ongoing, daily one, that’s an odd way to i.d. them.

“You’re in the system,” the customer rep told me. I waited a couple of seconds expecting him to say what that meant and that I would be receiving what I paid for, but didn’t hear anything but dead air. I explained that being “in the system” wasn’t what I paid for, getting the newspaper delivered was.

“Well the carrier probably didn’t see it [the new subscription],” he said. “This happens quite often. The carrier has eight papers, and didn’t see it. When we do it a second time, it usually works. If you don’t get it tomorrow, call us.”

Sunday arrived and no paper.

I called back and got a rep who made the first seem almost sympathetic.

“I’ll send the message to the carrier’s manager, and see if that works,” he said tonelessly. “I’ll send it to them.” Ah, the elusive “them.”

Who is the carrier’s manager? Wasn’t I calling — and had paid — the Sentinel?

“It’s an outside distribution company. We don’t have any control of it. I’ll send another message.”

Neither rep offered a “sorry,” and I had to ask for a “credit” both times. Monday, my paper arrived, but on Tuesday, it didn’t. Wednesday, it did. I know the Detroit papers have gone to a three-day-a-week home delivery schedule, so maybe the Sentinel was innovating a new alternate-day strategy.

This little snafu, which isn’t unique to my new hometown daily, has new meaning for the world we’re entering.

In the old world, identifying customers by address didn’t work very well, given that something like 20% of the populace changes address every year. Many newspaper companies, to be sure, have been upgrading their circulation management systems over the years, though, from what I hear, that’s still a work in progress at some.

In this new era of tablet reading, consider the new importance of identifying and knowing customers. Publishers that are ahead of the curve — like the Financial Times — and those that are scurrying to get to the curve, including the New York Times (which will launch its paid metering system early next year) know that customer i.d. is a newly urgent business necessity.

Why? As consumers, we’re expecting that if we’re going to pay a publisher for the privilege of reading their content, we’d better not get nickel-and-dimed along the way. Charge me for the paper, and for the website, and for my iPhone, and for my iPad?

That’s not going to play. Sure, offer me the chance to buy access on one particular device, if that suits my lifestyle, but make sure I’ve got a chance to send you one billpay payment and get what I call “all-access.” In fact, beyond a single price, I’d like my news provider to know which articles I’ve read and shared (and with whom) across platforms (old, dumb print excepted, of course).

The Times and others are working on that system. That work, though, isn’t trivial, given newspapers’ legacy systems of delivering tree pulp to driveways. Though not trivial, it’s fundamental to a business strategy that migrates loyal print readers to paying, digital readers. It’s a problem that must be solved, and my recent run-in with the forces of circulation makes me wonder aloud: Are newspaper companies at all ready for prime-time of tablet news-reading world?

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