Unhappy with the $20.95 per month the Picayune is now charging for three-day-a-week delivery? Here’s how to lower the cost:

Step 1 – Cancel your subscription.

Step 2 – Wait two months for the offer below to arrive in your mailbox.

Note that the fine print at the bottom of the page says that your subscription will continue at the $38.85 quarterly ($12.95 monthly) rate after the initial 3-month period, so this is not a “come-on” bait-and-switch offer.

The offer says that the 3-month package saves 24%, but $12.95 per month is actually 38% lower than the new $20.95 rate. (It is 24% lower than the old $16.95 rate.)

Will this offer be enough to get me to restart my subscription? No, it will not.

Times-Picayune post-cancellation subscription offer, March 2016

… because this would have put me over the edge:

Times-Picayune, Friday, February 5, 2016, Page A-1

After receiving a notice in the mail that the cost of my three-day-a-week subscription to the Times-Picayune would go from $16.95 to $20.95 a month (a 24% increase) effective January, 2016 …

Ring, Ring …

Times-Picayune Circulation Department: “Thank you for calling the Times-Picayune. How can I help you?”

Me: “I got your notice about the price increase, and I’d like to cancel my subscription.”

Circulation: “I see you’ve been a subscriber for a long time. We’d hate to see you go. What if we continued your subscription at the old rate?”

Me: “No”

Circulation: “How about if I switch you to Sunday Only for $8.95 a month?”

Me: “You know, your paper has gotten so bad I just don’t think I want to read it anymore.”

Circulation: “Gee, I’m sorry to hear that. What if we kept you at the old rate and threw in another month for free?”

Me: “No thanks”

Circulation: “Okay then, your subscription will stop at the end of the month.”

Me: “That’s fine, thanks”

Circulation: “Okay. Thanks for reading the Times-Picayune.”

Two years ago, I asked whether the Picayune editorial staff’s move to a new location away from its traditional Howard Avenue home was “a strategic move to allow the digital side of the house to easily separate itself from the print side in case of a future divorce”. We now have a partial answer.

NOLA Media Group announced today that it will close down its Howard Avenue printing plant and move print production to a more modern facility in Mobile, Alabama.

According to the announcement, over 100 people will lose their jobs in New Orleans as a result of the move, which is being done to “reduce print-related costs, improve efficiencies and allow for greater use of color in the pages of The Times-Picayune.”

The announcement also says that “the Howard Avenue property may be donated to a nonprofit institution in the community”.

Print? Who needs it?

The Times-Picayune isn’t the only Advance publication that suffers from “cursed curation”:

AL.com, Sunday, October 5, 2014
http://www.al.com/news/montgomery/index.ssf/2014/10/stolen_vehicle_driven_by_suspe.html

Grist for the legal mill.