Thursday, November 01, 2007

Sacramento Bee Suggestion Box

The Bee doesn't appear to have an online suggestion box, but the nice thing about blogs is, you can make one of your own...

For subscriptions -
  • Provide a "Monday through Friday" option, like the NY Times does, to make workplace subscriptions more attractive - I don't want to have to pay for and dispose of a small mountain of unwanted paper every week.

    (I probably don't know what I'm talking about, but isn't increasing readership the name of the game? so shouldn't promoting/enabling workplace-friendly subscription options yield a particularly high return on investment?)

  • Fix the Subscribe page so its personality (and treatment of visitors) isn't 180degrees off from the Bee's - make it so that it actually tells readers what they want and need to know. It hurts your brand, folks, when I want to - but can't - find out how much a subscription's actually going to cost.
    (the page gives the promo rate, but not the normal rate you'll end up paying, and not the rate for - or definition of - "outlying areas".)

    See the NY Times Subscribe page, for how it could be done.


And a thought for new editor Melanie Sill -
By overseeing both the news and the editorial pages (though not the editorials themselves) you have an unparalleled opportunity to make the paper into a source of good information, no?
It would be very, very cool if you could expose and/or evict the Op-Ed shills, by doing something along the lines of what Cline suggested.

And please, think about what a drought/flood/heat hellhole Sacramento will become, if global warming isn't stopped, and cover this slow-motion train wreck accordingly.

(Mark Lynas - On climate change, neutrality is cowardice)
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4 comments:

  1. SkiTheStars11/01/2007 12:17 PM

    It is so hard to get prices out of many websites. They want you to talk to a person who's paid by how many subscriptions, products, they can sell. It is truly annoying. If I can't get a price, I move on to another vendor.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Anna Haynes11/01/2007 7:52 PM

    > It is so hard to get prices out of many websites

    Yeah, but it's oxymoronic when it happens with a business whose mission is informing you.

    > If I can't get a price, I move on to another vendor.

    I was tempted - that and not being saddled with an unread Sunday paper every week. But it's that "Exit, Voice and Loyalty" thing - Knight Ridder lives on in McClatchy, and we owe them (also Al Gore) for getting the Iraq War right, we need to support them.

    (whereas Judith Miller wrote for the New York Times...)

    so this is the "voice" part.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Anna Haynes11/01/2007 9:04 PM

    Clarification - in my comment above,
    "we need to support them"
    should read
    "we need to support them, so they'll still be there for us."

    It's not charity; it's foresight.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Anonymous11/02/2007 12:44 AM

    (wish I could edit comments - my reasons seem to be flopping, fishlike, all over the map. They might not be coherent, but they're all true. )

    ReplyDelete

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