A column I wrote for E&P Technical, published September 17, 2001, under the headline “Circulation link remains rusty” and the deck “The great convergence gap: Few connect online and print subscription systems.” The argument: while the industry’s convergence conversation was focused on sharing editorial resources across print, broadcast, and online, a bigger opportunity was being ignored — connecting newspaper subscriber-circulation systems to online e-commerce systems.
And while that’s a great thing, I think there is an even better convergence opportunity that’s being overlooked: linking newspaper-subscriber-circulation systems with online e-commerce systems.
The column drew on a then-newly released report from the Newspaper Association of America‘s Circulation Federation, “Come Together: Defining the Complementary Marketing Roles of Print and Online.” As the column disclosed, Finberg-Gentry, the Digital Futurist Consultancy, were consultants to the NAA on the project. A survey of 290 circulation managers supplied the central number:
Only 7% of those responding said their online and print subscriptions systems are electronically linked together. That leaves a whopping 93% “unconverged.”
What newspapers used instead was described as “a kludge of systems” — e-mail to the circulation or online department, sometimes printed out and retyped into the circulation system by customer-service agents. The column singled out one practice as the worst case:
The worst example is the kind of site that requires online customers to write down the customer-service telephone number, move away from their computers, and phone the newspaper to request subscriptions
The disconnect held across all circulation size categories, from the smallest papers to the largest. The column identified a twofold dilemma: little internal demand for a fully integrated customer-service solution (papers “can’t measure what they are missing,” making ROI hard to build), and the fact that most circulation-management systems were “home-grown” and would take resources to upgrade or replace.
The underlying problem was framed as a difference in premise between the two kinds of systems:
Many circulation systems are built on the premise of “delivery-list management”; Web e-commerce systems are built on the idea of “customer management
The recommendation was for circulation managers to build complete customer-management systems — tracking, for example, who is a subscriber and a frequent user of classified ads, or who has requested information from the Web site and is a Sunday-only subscriber — to support loyalty programs and upselling. The column also called for better communication between newspapers and their technology suppliers, arguing vendors needed to re-engineer away from legacy technology and toward the Internet as their platform.