Thursday, December 29, 2011

Subscriber Confusion at The New York Times

Yesterday afternoon, I received an email from the New York Times to the effect that I had cancelled my subscription. (In fact, I had requested no such thing!)

To keep me as a subscriber, the paper offered me the next 16 weeks at a 50% savings. In order to prevent cancellation, the letter urged me to call an 800 number!

Well, I started calling immediately and I kept getting a busy signal from about 2PM until 6PM.  I assumed it must have been a mistake and planned to call in the morning.

This morning, I read an email from the Times with the heading Correction. It urged me to disregard yesterday's email which had been sent by error and apologized for any confusion created.

According to a Reuters article at Yahoo news, the error was an in house one.

The email should have only been sent to several hundred people and an employee error initiated the email to over 8 million readers.

I'm glad the situation has been rectified.

Happy New Year to all.