"I'm canceling my subscription ... "

Best way to handle it is for you to pass it on. Really. Don't get involved in crap like that, especially if name-calling comes into play. Try to be professional and pass the call on or hang up.

 

Our calls about dropping the paper center around cost, i.e., they're cutting back and we're expendable. (It doesn't help that most of the content in our paper is available for free on the Web. I said most. I don't put all of it up there. We're not a pay for play site ... yet.)
Our office manager offers a discount, about 25 percent, off the normal subscription rate, and most of them take that.

 

Agreed. These things are best left to trained professionals, no more than you'd send the circulation manager out to the Podunk Bowl on Friday night. It's like when someone calls saying "we'll give you money" to increase JV coverage, get a larger announcement for youth league signups, ect. ... they immediately get transferred to the ad manager. All of a sudden, what they get for free from me is a bargain!

 

You guys don't know "I'm gonna cancel..." stories until you've worked in a call center for DirecTV!!!! :-D

 

They just do that so they can get a better rate. Those companies are starting to catch on and are saying "bye" in greater numbers.

 

More than once I've said "Would you like me to transfer you to circulation?"
I generally listen, and if we've screwed something up, I'll try to fix it. But if it's a rant about some nonsense, I just cut them off.

We had a knucklehead call in back during the Masters ranting because we ran a story about Tiger's return to golf. "He's not a very good person, and you shouldn't be running stories on him." .... "Thanks for calling."

 

My favorite, my last town had a local message board, where some of the prominent citizens posted and bragged about never subscribing to the "local rag." I'd pop the browser there from time to time just to see what the local rabble-rousers were rousing about, usually it was complete slander. Then, inevitably, local paper-hater comes in the next week to renew his subscription. I give him credit for not posting anonymously.

This lasted until he said something rather libelous about the editor on the site, said again he didn't subscribe, then walked into the office the next week and threatened to cancel his subscription because we didn't run his daughter's 58th place finish in a cross country race.

 

Yep, I rarely get flustered over all of that. If someone wants to cancel, fine. But I'm not going to be blackmailed into running or not running something.

People like to cite cancelled subscriptions, but no one ever tracks how many NEW subscribers one gets as a result of something.

 

When I was covering preps back in 1996 we received two kinds of calls...

1. You don't cover (the area's biggest high school) enough.
2. You cover (the area's biggest high school) too much.

Honestly that was 90 percent of the calls to the prep department.

 

Our editor always called people who canceled to ask them why. I remember he called one guy who cited our bias against a local football coach. As proof of this bias, he cited a couple stories we'd run since he canceled. Editor's conclusion: One less subscription, but one additional newsstand customer.

 

Yeah. The story chats online are filled with people making comments about all the stories and what a rag the paper is and how they are so glad the canceled their subscription.