Should you subscribe to your own publication?

What are you supposed to do if your newspaper won't deliver to you? When I first started the circ guy was all ready to sign me up for home delivery, but after I told him where I lived, which is off the street a bit, he said: "Oh, well, (carrier) won't walk back there. He won't get out of his car."

Fuck them. I get a free copy at work anyway.

 

The toilets at work are more comfortable for reading anyway.

 

That's 10 beers, or maybe less.

 

I thought that, but didn't want to assume anything.

 

I don't call it a Carl Lewis leap or walking an old lady's bags across the street. I call it making sure the content is the best it can be my responsibility and marketing the paper someone else's responsibility.

There's the story I posted from another paper where the sports department went out and actively recruited businesses to advertise in a proposed sports tab (provided they could get the ads for it). The sports department handed the advertising department a list of area businesses that said they would subscribe. Ad department came back a week later and said none of them were interested. Does that make the reporter look bad in the eye of the business owner (who might have been a friend of someone on the sports staff) or does it make the ad department look bad for not being able to sell 18 guaranteed ads.

If a sports writer convinces a friend or neighbor or family member to subscribe and there are repeated delivery problems, who's going to hear more about it, the sports writer who sold the subscription or the circulation department? My money is on the sports writer.

 

I can't count on two hands how many times I could have told the same story, just from my own personal experience. Three years in a row, I gave the ad dept. a list of interested businesses -- as well 2-3 football programs from the year before, to see which businesses had advertised in the school's own publication -- for our preseason football tab.

Not one of them came through, in three years. I have done my share of cold-calling; I understand how hard advertising is. But I refuse to believe that not a single business that I suggested to them would be willing to buy even a 2x4 ad for the preseason football tab. Not for three straight years.

I'll be damned if I'm going to flat-out do their jobs for them. I'll help, I'll suggest, I'll "talk up" the paper. But I already have a job -- and they have theirs.

 

Same theme, reverse pattern for subscriptions. You can talk the paper up for someone, drop in a reference to the special going on, but if that person doesn't call to subscribe there's nothing more you can do.

 

this whole, we should sell subscribtions idea, has me wondering aloud:

i work 5-6 days a week, 50-55 hours a week. the hours i work are less than ideal.

at every paper i've ever worked, most circulation folks, with a year or two of experience, work monday through friday, show up between 8 to 8:30 a.m., take more than an hour lunch, and leave at 4:45ish p.m. every day. save for special promos, this pretty much is their schedule. these also are the same people who play key roles in organizing secret santa at christmastime, american idol brackets, hawaiian days or any other of the myriad of stupid shit that takes place inside newspaper offices throughout america.

and i should use my personal relationships with family and friends as leverage to make them buy a product they may not wish to purchase? fuck that. the premise behind this theory is asinine at best.

 

Easy, old hack. Take a deep breath. You'll be able to retire soon enough. Say hello to Peggy and the kids.

 

Should you subscribe to your own publication? Yes. It\'s the right thing to do. Take some pride in your job. And you\'ll be a better-informed member of the newsroom.
Should reporters be urged/incentivized/encouraged to sell subscriptions? No. We don\'t want circulation people writing stories, do we? That\'s not their job. They shouldn\'t make us sell papers, it\'s not our job.

 

Which is precisely my point. When you get down to telling kids who are slaving away 60 hours a week and getting paid bupkus that they have to choose between their social life and "doing the right thing" and subscribing to the paper they see every day in the office, that's ridiculous. Completely different story to those of us who make enough that $10 a month is nothing. But I know I would have rather spent that $10 going to a movie or going out for beers when I was at that point in my life.

 

Damn right. And I'm one of them.

If you're "barely scraping by" then you sure as hell shouldn't be paying 21% interest on credit cards. I would venture to guess the average amount people throw away in credit card interest each month would pay for several subscriptions. Hell, the money they throw away by giving Uncle Sam a $2,000+ interest-free loan every year (aka tax refund) would pay for several subscriptions.

Of course, a subscription pays for itself with only 10 minutes of effort, so this entire argument about "can't afford it" is ridiculous anyway.