The cure for writer's cramp is writer's block. - Inigo DeLeon

The Wall Street Journal renewal policy

by Jason Preston

My co-worker, Kim Larsen, canceled her Wall Street Journal subscription a few months ago.

You would think that signing up to get the paper again would be a pretty simple process, right?

When she called today to reactivate her subscription, the service department at the Journal told her that reactivating her old online subscription for another year would cost $119.

Signing up for a new online subscription on their web page costs $79.

“It makes me want to get tell them to take a flying friggin leap,” Kim told me, “How ridiculous is that? Thanks, I’d love to fill out all this information again.”

In this particular case, they’re going to get a new subscriber anyway. But I think that getting a new subscriber is far more valuable than getting a new reader, and newspapers ought to be doing what they can to make it a painless process.

Especially since Kim is trying to sign up for the online subscription. Every operator on their phones should be pushing that option with deep discounts—the marginal cost for one more online subscriber is, roughly, $0.

So that’s $79 of profit for the Journal. Don’t discourage that.

April 30, 2008 | Filed Under Observations 

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2 comments so far:

  1. On April 30th, 2008, Kim Larsen wrote:

    Friggin right Jason!

  2. On May 5th, 2008, Monica Guzman wrote:

    A few months ago I was this close to cancelling my New York Times Sunday subscription. I called customer service to share the bad news, and without missing a beat, the woman on the other line told me she’d cut the monthly rate in half, from the $26 I was paying to $13. I was stunned, but considering the paper’s plummeting profits, not entirely surprised. I kept my subscription, and thank God — ’cause I don’t know what I’d have done without this Sunday’s summer movie preview.

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