[quote=eavesdropper][quote=flu]Let me tell you a sad story of the state of the L.A. Times….
My parents use to subscribe to L.A. Times for about $80/month for 7 days. Then they started to realize they don’t really need the papers as much, so they ended up calling them and renegotiating to $40/month for 5 days…Then after about 3 weeks, they decided, they really don’t need the papers anymore since they get things from CNN.com, so they called and cancelled.
The L.A Times didn’t want to lose them as a customer (been a subscriber for 20+years). So while my parents continued to insist on cancelling, L.A. Times kept lowering the price…End result? 7 day subscription for….$1/month….
[/quote]
So figure how much money your paper is going to lose doing this. The one-dimensional strategizing by these companies boggles the mind. I keep hearing the phrase, “Think outside the box”, but it is extremely rare that I see actual employment of the concept. I don’t know what they are teaching in B-schools today, but American business executives, for the most part, appear incapable of any sort of strategic analysis of their company operations. There certainly does not appear to be any proactive crisis management; I’m guessing that’s not possible when you won’t even admit the possibility that a crisis could arise at some point in the future. No, crisis management for most of the banks, the car manufacturers, the newspapers, and the insurance companies seems to be a corporate version of the little Dutch boy who plugged a leak in the Haarlem seawall with his finger, except that these incompetents expect the taxpayers to plug their leaks (and, courtesy of an obliging government, we do).
[/quote]
It’s not just newspaper though. Magazines are hurting too. And a lot of the ones normally you find on the newstand for $4/pop folks are getting them free too. I had a free trial subscription for a few magazines in the auto,news,finance, and 2 years later after cancelling them, they keep sending them to me, even though I’ve called them every 6 months confirming I’m not a subscriber…Someone once explained to me, that part of this is also due to demographics….Supposedly, some of the magazines are given free to certain economic/ethnic/social demographics, I guess due to all the advertisements. Supposedly, some of these strategies also include given the subscriptions away to folks with a certain level of household income, as supposedly they are a vehicle to get ads in product placements in hopes of getting one to spend more…So, yes sometimes those “shi-shi” magazines end up on my doorstep for some reason…Anyway, kinda a waste imho since I don’t have time to read everything, and a lot of them end up in the trash….
