I checked my Mastercard bill this afternoon. There were two charges of $18.04 attributed to the New York Times. Once was for April's subscription and one was for May. That's $216 a year. I've been wondering why I subscribe at all; this financial realization prompted me to cancel the subxcription entirely.
It's not that I have a problem with supporting journalism. I have the local paper delivered to my driveway (for an exorbitant amount of money every month) because without local journalism how would I know that our county executive was double dipping his paycheck before his retirement. Local journalism brings me the high school sports news, the skinny on the UofA basketball teams, and reminders to subscribe to the paper's Send A Kid To Camp Fund. My friends write letters to the editor, and so do TBG and I. I have no problem paying for the privilege of being clued in to what's going on in my town.
But I'm not reading the NYTimes so much any more, except for Modern Love. During Pandemica, I read the Times and the Washington Post every day. Now, I have better things to do with my time. I made a mental list of what I would miss by cancelling the subscription, and it was a short list, indeed. So, off to the website I went.
And that's where the scam came in. Apparently, you can subscribe to the NYTimes for $1 a week for an entire year. All I had to do was cancel my old subscription and that offer appeared on the very next screen. Had I not looked, I would never have known.
I knew that tactic worked for the cable companies - threaten to go get a DISH and all of a sudden your rates start to tumble. But the newspaper running a scam like this? I'm appalled. I'm disgusted. And I'm out several hundred dollars.
Still, for $52 a year, I'll still have Jennifer Rubin and Alexandra Petri in my phone when I need to add some snark to my day. So, I opted in to the Special Offer, and made a notation in my calendar for 51 weeks from now - Check out NYT subscription scams.
I'm off to call the cable company.
Really? I just got an email notice that mt NYT subscription was now $17 something a month and I thought that was awfully high. I started subscribing to support journalism and liked the Times editorials. Like you we have the Seattle paper delivered to our paper box, and often NYT articles and editorials are in the Seattle paper. We were also subscribing to the Washington Post, and it has apparently suddenly dropped us. I need to do some checking. .
ReplyDeleteI subscribe to the hard copy of our local newspaper, though it has been ruined by evil Gannett, but I still read the NYT and Washington Post every day, and watch the PBS NewsHour every night, and listen to NPR when I am out driving. The news is an important part of my daily life, and is even more important during the pandemic, which is not over for us.
ReplyDelete