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12 Feb 2010 15:30

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Biz: The adventures of Newsday Customer No. 36: Now they want money?

  • What a convoluted system. For a week, we told you about our trials and travails regarding Newsday’s subscription advertising. We got bored of making fun of them admittedly (and tired of the useless “news alerts” that felt like vectors to send ads to us more than actual news alerts), but now they’ve actually given us some ammo.
  • Shoddy service Today, they finally sent us an e-mail, two and a half weeks after we signed up, asking for money, with full details of the process. Nobody ever called us or asked us about it. If Newsday wanted our service, they would call us first.
  • pay all at once? We definitely don’t like the $40/every two months setup, instead of just subscribing for a week just to try it. So yeah, we’re not signing up for this. It’s seemingly designed to discourage you from subscribing to Newsday.
  • Our advice to newsday Paywalls can work, but your all-or-nothing paywall system seems broken. There’s no online component at all. Also, people outside of Long Island are interested in what happens in Long Island. Consider that, guys.

A final tally of our Newsday adventures

  • 17 days it took for Newsday to decide to charge us
  • 17 number of text-message updates we got from Newsday; nearly all of them had ads as long as the news itself
  • six of the updates said “Officials: 5 killed, 12 injured in Conn. power plant blast” (spread out over two days)
  • 4-5 number of e-mail updates we’ve been getting from Newsday each day, and they’re kinda annoying