• 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

• Today, they ran a story about a mannequin in the HOV Lane. For most papers, they’d think, holy crap! Perfect viral news opportunity. But not the Cablevision-run Newsday. They’re trying to make the newspaper into the Web equivalent of a cable channel. It’s designed as if it’s a TV station’s Web site, not a newspaper. And in our week of subscribing, that was the prevailing message: We don’t understand the market. Here are some quick numbers.

• 18 number of e-mails we got from Newsday; two-thirds of those were “breaking” news
• 8 number of text messages we got from the service; seven of them had links to ads
• no it’s not worth the $5 a week, and no, we still haven’t been charged, either, guys source

• In response to a question, Terry said that we had approximately three dozen subscribers who have signed up to pay $5 per week for access to newsday.com.
• Cablevision President of Local Media Tad Smith • In a memo regarding Newsday’s plan for subscriptions and Cablevision’s overall media strategy. Sure, he’s full of it and then some, but we have to admit we got a kick out of the fact he noted our subscription in the note. We’re No. 36! We’re No. 36! source

• This photo turns Long Island into a cliche the way “Fargo” turned Minnesota into one. Can you guess what the story’s about? (Hint: It’s got to do with the kid.) Man, the only image more cliche than this we could think of is perhaps a picture of the Seaver family from Growing Pains – you know, before Kirk Cameron went off the deep end. Anyway, we’ve been with the site nearly a week, haven’t paid yet, and get the feeling that the paper is not offering anything close to the $5/week price tag, a price tag that’s supposed to be a deterrent to guys like us signing up outsides of the confines of Cablevision’s walled garden. Unimpressed. (Note: This article is behind a paywall, but maybe it’ll give you enough of a hint to tell you what it’s about.) source

• We understand what Newsday is trying to do with its “Quick Read” format on its $4 million, paywall-ridden site, but the implementation is weak. We say that as warriors of the quick-read information format. We’re like Mel Gibson in the first “Mad Max.” Newsday’s implementation is just flashy, like Tina Turner in “Beyond Thunderdome.” How does a giant image with the lead of a story and a giant photo constitute a “quick read”? There’s no bullet points. There’s no attempt to contextualize the information. It’s just an entryway into another page with another ad – something that the quick read format has a lot of, by the way. Oh yeah, one thing we want to mention: We’ve been subscribers of Newsday.com for three days now, and we’ve yet to be contacted by anyone about paying for our $5/week subscription. source

• Newsday breaking news http://www.4info.com/x/bt97 Officials seek more cash to house sex offenders  *Introducing New Robitussin(R) To Go! http://4in.fo/GyeR6A
• A text message from the Newsday paywall text alert service • Regarding news that’s apparently important enough to send us a text message about. The news itself? Relatively important (whether or not it’s breaking is questionable). What weirds us out, though, is the ad. You have three sentences to break news about something – news we’re paying for – and one of the sentences is a Robitussin ad? (We couldn’t get the link to work, by the way.) We specifically asked not to get offers. This seems sneaky. We were all about to write something positive about their site which is actually useful and worth paying for, and then they had to send us this. Newsday fail. (Note: The link to the article is behind a paywall, and we’re linking to it anyway just so you, too, feel the pain of hitting a paywall. It hurts almost as much as running into a real one.) source

• In our first piece of breaking news from Newsday since our $5-a-week paywall infiltration subscription began, we’re informed that a redhead who likes science and his classmates are going to compete for some national award sponsored by Intel. The kids are up for awards of up to $100,000, which is cool. Good luck, guys, but we’re seriously spending $5 a week on this crap? How is this even remotely breaking? There’s nothing heady about it. (BTW, if you want to read the story, you’ll have to subscribe. Them’s the breaks of a paywall.) source

• When we read yesterday that Newsday had a total of 35 subscribers to its paywall-riddled Web site, we wondered how this could be. How could only 35 people who weren’t subscribed to Cablevision or the print product say, “I’m paying Newsday $5 a week for some of the best damn journalism to be found on Long Island!” So, we decided to find out why. ShortFormBlog is now Customer No. 36.

Subscription notes:

• one They don’t bill you right away or ask for your credit card. Instead, Newsday.com staff contacts you afterwards. This is stupid.
• two You have to give them your phone number. And the registration thing is written as if you live in New York state. We live in D.C., dudes.
• three Newsday gives you a huge list of ways you can receive news from them. This includes e-mail and SMS alerts. We signed up; hey, we paid for it!

Review of Newsday’s signup process:

• C- it clearly doesn’t understand how online commerce works source