{"id":172,"date":"2006-02-20T22:26:29","date_gmt":"2006-02-21T03:26:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/63.247.138.3\/~drweevil\/?p=172"},"modified":"2007-09-03T18:21:02","modified_gmt":"2007-09-03T22:21:02","slug":"petty-annoyance-of-the-month","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.drweevil.org\/?p=172","title":{"rendered":"Petty Annoyance of the Month"},"content":{"rendered":"

I went to the Time<\/em> site a few weeks ago to look up an article I remembered from 1986. (Their coverage of Reagan’s bombing of Libya included a picture and caption so ridiculous that I’m still laughing about them almost twenty years later. I wanted to fisk them, and I couldn’t find them in the U.N.C. back issues, which are missing a few pages.) Time<\/em>‘s website charged me a very reasonable $1.98 for access, but:<\/p>\n

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  1. I was looking for a picture, and the archives do not include pictures. Perhaps not surprising, but it would have been nice to have been told that up front, so I wouln’t waste my $1.98.<\/li>\n
  2. Paying for access to the archives automatically signed me up for a four-week free trial subscription, which I emphatically did not want and turned out to be fairly difficult to cancel. When they e-mailed to ask how I liked my new subscription, I explained to them that I didn’t want it, hadn’t ever wanted it, and asked them to cancel it. Apparently no one reads these surveys, because issues of Time<\/em> soon began appearing in my mailbox, disappearing immediately afterwards in the nearby dumpster. After three weeks of this, I went to their website to cancel ‘my’ subscription. Since I declined to accept their cookie, they declined to let me in. It took 20+ minutes on the telephone, mostly trying to get through to a human being, to actually cancel, and I’m not yet sure that it worked.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Some interesting conclusions can be drawn from this:<\/p>\n

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    1. It’s not surprising that traditional media are losing money: Time<\/em> insists on sending multiple copies of their magazine even to someone who throws them in the dumpster unread and will never pay a penny for them. And they haven’t even gotten around to charging my credit card the $1.98 I agreed to pay.<\/li>\n
    2. Then again, perhaps they’re not losing money. Are they counting me as part of their circulation (sort of true), or even as a paid subscriber (totally false)? If so, are they counting me for the entire year, or just for the few weeks between pseudo-subscribing and cancellation? Most important, do their circulation auditors know the answers to these questions? Do their advertisers? Are circulations declining even more precipitously than officially admitted?<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

      I went to the Time site a few weeks ago to look up an article I remembered from 1986. (Their coverage of Reagan’s bombing of Libya included a picture and caption so ridiculous that I’m still laughing about them almost twenty years later. I wanted to fisk them, and I couldn’t find them in the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-172","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.drweevil.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/172","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.drweevil.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.drweevil.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.drweevil.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.drweevil.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=172"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.drweevil.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/172\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.drweevil.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=172"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.drweevil.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=172"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.drweevil.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=172"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}