This morning, I tried to cancel my New York Times weekend home delivery subscription. At $36 a month, on a freelance writer’s salary, it’s an expense that I can’t really justify. I almost never read it. Usually, it ends up sitting on my coffee table for a week before I throw it out.
I’m loathe to criticize the New York Times, so I’ll just say that rather than making me feel more informed, reading the paper usually makes me feel bad about myself. It’s full of glowing profiles of socialites and trend pieces that make me feel like a failure and a loser. This might all be because the only sections I really read, besides the hard news, are the style, real estate and travel sections. But still. I want to feel invigorated after I read the paper — not like I should crawl up in a ball and stop trying to better myself.
I don’t know if the quality of the content has changed. I know that the New York Times has to fight for subscribers, and in doing so, must compete with the Internet. So rather than highlighting really thorough, well researched pieces that are buried within the paper, it features lots of stories on the following:
1. Yoga might be dangerous!
2. Delicious food
3. How to pit yourself against real mental illnesses to assess if you’re actually crazy
4. Therapy!
5. Internet Entrepreneurs
6. Lifestyles of the Rich & Famous
7. Why you shouldn’t feel that bad that your kid is kind of an idiot
8. Why dating is so hard these days!
9. Things have changed so much for women!
10. Why republicans are idiots
11. The millennials are such a fascinating puzzle!
12. Opinion rant is cutesy speak
And it does so, in my opinion, poorly. The writing on the Internet is unfettered and full of voice. The writing on the New York Times is constrained by its own style; in essence, it is dry and boring.
But the New York Times doesn’t need to be the Internet. What it needs to be is one of the only sources that actually reports stories with facts that are checked and double checked and triple checked for accuracy. It needs to be an authority source. It needs to be a publication that invests in the long term fruition of a story. And maybe that means losing subscribers, and tightening staff. But there has to be a core group of people who are still looking to read excellent reporting, and those people are, I assume, losing patience. If the New York Times continues in the direction it’s headed now — I’ll call it the direction of The Atlantic, whose sole purpose now seems to be to publish inflammatory cover stories that will gain traction on the Huffington Post — it will actually become irrelevant.
In any case, it was virtually impossible to cancel my subscription. First of all, I couldn’t do it on the website. I had to call a number, where I was connected with a representative. “I’d like to cancel my subscription,” I said.
“May I ask why?” she said. She was very nice, and I mean that genuinely.
“I just don’t really read it,” I said.
“How about switching just to Sunday delivery?” she said.
“No thank you,” I told her.
“How about if we throw in a digital subscription to your iPad,” she said.
“No thank you,” I told her.
“If you cancel your subscription, you will lose your digital service. Can I tell you about our monthly options?”
“Sure.”
“You can get a subscription for your computer and smartphone for $15 a month, a subscription for your iPad for $22…”
“I think that I’d like to cancel my entire subscription,” I said.
“How many articles do you read a month?”
“I’m not sure,” I said. The truth is that I very rarely, if at all, click on New York Times articles anymore, unless they are about serial killers, Adderall addictions, or wars. The website doesn’t report as quickly as say, the Daily Mail, in times of crisis. And the photographs take much longer to appear, and when they do, they appear small. Not to mention that the most emailed list is just suffocating in the annoying trend pieces I mentioned above.
“If you read more than 10, you should get a digital subscription,” she said.
“Ok, I will try the $15 a month,” I said.
“How about if we throw the paper in for $22?” she said.
“No, thank you,” I said again. The paper, if I’m being honest, is more of a pain in the ass than a boon, even if I were to read it, because it’s heavy, and ends up crowding our recycling bin.
“It looks like you’re eligible for a 50% off discount for the next three months,” she said. “You can get the weekend paper plus the digital subscription for $14.”
“Oh really,” I said. That was actually a good deal. “Fine, I’ll stick with that.”
And I hung up the phone with exactly the same plan I had tried to cancel five minutes earlier, albeit discounted to the point where I’m not sure why its even worth it for the New York Times to send me a paper at all.
