SHARE
Are Facebook, Google and Apple as different from the old news media as they claim to be?
Downsizers must be a problem for the embattled newspaper industry. Late last year my husband and I sold our family house and bought a small apartment on the edge of the city, closer to my job. But if I imagined that I’d have more time to pore over the morning papers before rushing out the door, no such luck: it proved totally impractical to have the newspaper delivered to our apartment building. So with a Proustian pang for the roll of crisp newsprint that used to wake me at 5.30 am as it hit the pot plants in the front yard, I rang and cancelled the Age subscription I had held for twenty-five years, since the days when I first worked for the paper.
A pleasant woman in a call centre somewhere efficiently cancelled both the print edition and the digital replica on my iPad. I waited to see if she would offer me an incentive to keep the digital version. In former times, the sales rep would have produced with a ta-da a list of incentives to continue, but not this time. Near the end of our short conversation, she blandly observed that she would leave it to me to go online to purchase a new digital-only subscription, if I wanted one. And that was that. I felt more like the jilted than the jilter…
