Monthly Archives: June 2009

Snail mail fail

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Here’s yet another another example of why monopolies are no good for customers.

My wife and I recently moved and prepared to change our address with the Post Office, a routine practice of getting a form, filling it out, and dropping it in the slot. Or so we thought.

uspsbs

Yeah, right.

I went online and discovered that an electronic change of address costs $1, charged to one’s credit card for verification. I find that dubious at best, since the old method sent a card to your house as verification; neither quick nor secure. The $2 fee isn’t a huge cost, but the previous process was free and it rankled me to have to pay for it now.

I work near the post office, so instead I strolled over one day to put ink to paper as I have for years.

These days, change of address forms in the lobby have all been replaced with flyers directing people online. I asked an employee about the old forms and he told me it was all done electronically now. “What about people without a computer?” I asked. He looked at me like I just slapped his mother.

Back at the computer, I found a loophole that allows customers to print the change of address and take it to the post office at no charge.

I went back to the post office to deliver my printed forms and, when I commented that the post office seemed to be passing the cost of printing on to customers, a different employee said they had plenty of the old forms, but were, “instructed to hide them behind the counter like pornography.”

Crazy.

On the last day in our apartment, I ran into the mail carrier and asked him why we were still getting mail there, not getting mail at our new address and had never received a confirmation of the change. This change was all news to him and — surprise — handed me one of the old forms to fill out. Apparently, my home-printed forms had hit the circular file.

So I begrudgingly paid the dollar (actually two — one each for Kristi and I — because previous efforts to change our address as a “family” ended up with us getting junk mail addressed to my parents. More fail.) and waited for mail at the new address.

Ultimately, we lodged a complaint with the postal service for poor performance and for taking our money for nothing.

The post office in Salem called mere days after the complaint was filed to say they were contacting the corvallis office and that we should hear from them in a day or two. Almost a month later, Kristi gets a call.

It gets worse.

Apparently, the caller had a checklist of questions to answer and just wanted yes or no answers. When Kristi was trying to explain what had happened, he asked her “Do you think you can be quiet long enough for me to complete a sentence?”

Seriously.

Now we’re apparently going to get a form to fill out and return in order to be refunded our $2.

This whole thing has cost us and the post office time and money, not to mention the bad taste from having to deal with and be insulted by the bureaucracy of this antiquated and insulated monopoly.

So, to companies considering making a switch to an online process:

  • Don’t lie about it.
  • If you’re a monopoly, you still need to make arrangements for people who don’t want to do it your way. Deal with it.
  • If you’re in a serious deficit, you can’t stand to be alienating customers.
  • A customer service note: when you’re trying to make amends, don’t be an asshole.

Adding value to print by letting online be its own animal

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Here in the mid-Willamette Valley, we’re in the process of switching from a really archaic copy-and-paste content management system to a vastly more powerful system in our newsrooms. I’m not doing as much reporting as I used to, instead I’m picking up more work moving this process forward and planning where we’re going. Good times.

While we lose some options in design and navigation as the company moves toward standardized design across properties, we’re expecting to gain tenfold in our ability to serve content better through tags and categories and a vastly improved (we’re told) search function.

I’ve been burned before so I don’t want to put my eggs in one basket, but I’m pretty excited about the options we’ll have once we understand the system more completely.

More importantly, though, is that we could (hopefully) be on the verge of a sea-change in how and what we post to the Web. First off, everyone in the newsroom is to be trained and will be expected to post their own stuff to the Web.

This led me to wonder if our Web content system could become our primary tool for managing and creating content. Maybe, but the system is primarily a publishing tool and doesn’t handle drafts and note-taking, so could lead to more problems than it’s worth right now.

This hasn’t stopped me from pushing for change in our newsroom processes.

My question for the past couple of weeks as we work through the specifics has been “Does it add value?” I read an interesting post this week by Tom Foremski about how the Web devalues anything it touches, or at least anything that can be digitized: music, TV, newspapers and magazines and software.

Foremski emphasises that this devaluation isn’t in the social value of these items, but rather in the cost necessary to produce and, especially, distribute them, a take on an idea developed by Clay Shirky.

It’s a point that’s clear to folks working to keep news organizations afloat these days and it calls for a new way of thinking about content and its relationship with readers. It’s also why the pay-for-online-journalism idea won’t, I believe, ever gain any real traction, especially the general interest publication I work for.

Information is everywhere and it’s free. Yeah, yeah, we know it’s not free to produce, but nobody cares about your bottom line. Find a way to get it done.

So why not make the Web operation into one big beatblog about the mid-Willamette Valley and break away from duplicating print and online?
Here’s the vision:

  • Take advantage of what the Web does well, including breaking news and deep connections through hyperlinks. Moving forward, we’ll be able to easily add hyperlinks and suggest related stories. That deepens the experience for Web readers in a way they expect and can benefit from.
  • Feature local multimedia more prominently and more effectively present related and source material.
  • Use tools like Publish2 to allow journalists to share what they’re reading and source material for stories they’re working on.
  • Move beyond simple (often nasty) commenting on stories toward a chat model, hosted by the reporter.

What I’m still working on are details about how to add value into the print edition.

To start, it’s important that we let online be online and stop posting the print version of stories to the Web site.

Those pieces are snapshots written for the newspaper and should maximize a readers’ experience with that medium with longer, more reflective stories and clip-and-save utility.

Let online carry the feedback, the early versions and the long tail.

Both have value at different times and for different people. Our goal should be to make a print subscription attractive to those who get immediate news online and teach print subscribers how to join the online experience.

This could develop into completely distinct print and digital products (I hope) and a new set of skills and workflow in the newsroom. I’m excited about the possibilities.

A promise to update with new initiatives

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I’ve been a little slow about posting here, for a variety of reasons (mostly that we bought a house that has required a significant amount of work — and so when I don’t have a paintbrush or wrench in my hand, we’re asleep).

But after Carlos Virgen mentioned some new initiatives in Walla Walla, I implored him to post about them and he called me out to do the same, I figured I’d better oblige.

So here’s a public promise to follow up about the initiatives we’re undertaking at Mid-Valley Newspapers. It involves social networking, some failure and some rising from the ashes. We hope.

More to come.