Much has been written about the plight of the traditional newspaper in our time. I won’t add to that pile here. Only because this is a story about how I intend to subscribe to a newspaper, but can’t seem to find a way to do so.

I’m a happy newspaper reader by most counts. I’ve been a long-time subscriber to the Sunday edition of the Belleville News Democrat. I have had nothing but fantastic experiences with the BND.

I’ve been an on-and-off subscriber to the Wall Street Journal. When I was initiating my current subscription, I started receiving it in the mail. My mail is delivered between 3 and 5 each afternoon. What good is the WSJ, delivered as the markets close each day? It only took a tweet and a few emails, and the circulation team at the WSJ was able to work with the local distributor to ensure I was added to a morning delivery route and had a paper on my doorstep at 5:30 each morning when I came downstairs to read and eat breakfast.

Contrast that with my experience trying to subscribe to my long-suffering local paper, our local edition of Lee Enterprises’ Suburban Journals in the St. Louis market.

A few years ago, our local paper became “subscription only”. I’ll admit – since they did it, I thought it was a stupid idea. You’re having a hard time cutting it in the economy, so you tell us you’re not going to deliver your free carrier for tons of local ads with outdated local news unless I pay you? So we sat it out.

Until this year, when our son was selected to be featured in a series of articles about local students starting kindergarten. On August 13, we paid the $19.99 for a one year subscription. Granted, that’s $20 for just 52 weekly (Thursday) papers. It already feels like we’re being worked over for the news, but we were willing to take it in order to get copies of the articles about our son.

Weeks passed… no paper.

More weeks passed… no paper.

I tried on three occasions to call the circulation department, to no avail, because their hours are planned so that no reasonable, working person trying to raise a family could ever have a hope of calling and talking to a real person during business hours.

Finally, on September 26, I tweeted.

Which led to a direct message. Which led to an email.

On the same day, the person at the other end of the tweet connected me with Dave of the local distribution service, who called me and politely acknowledged our issue and assured me we would start to see our paper right away. He followed up with an email confirming the conversation:

Michael we spoke on the phone just a little while ago about you delivery issues and I wanted to send you my email address in case you have any further problems.

I replied, thanking him.

More weeks have passed… no paper.

So today, nearly a full month later again, I emailed Dave and the person on the other end of the original tweet.

I know it’s now been nearly a month since we spoke about our subscription which we initiated with a $19.99 charge on our [credit card] on AUGUST 13. And despite the assurance that we would start receiving the paper, we still have yet to receive a paper other than the last two Saturdays when we received not a paper but the free “here’s a sample of the coupons and ads” throwaway.

I think I’ve come to understand why the newspaper is a dying industry.

I’ve had the pleasure to meet and collaborate with a lot of the content side of the news industry – the journalists and the content creators – in recent years. I consider Nicole Hollway of the St. Louis Beacon a close friend and respected peer. I’ve developed a good relationship with Joy Mayer at Mizzou. I’ve long had a friendship, nurtured years ago in Scouting, with Dan McDonough at Elauwit Media.

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. I was pleased to be part of an industry forum on measuring engagement in the news at the Reynolds Journalism Institute at Mizzou last year. The content side of the business is full of fantastic people who work hard to deliver the news that matters, particularly in the local media.

But if the business side of the house can’t keep the wheels on the cart, it’s going to end up in the ditch before too long.

How hard is it to turn on a subscription to a newspaper in 2011? It was easy to bill my credit card the same day for the subscription. Have we come so far from the days of a neighbor kid pleased to ride his bike around the neighborhood in the morning to bring home a little extra cash, in order to ensure good, timely news on our doorsteps?

Or, like the rest of America, should I give up on the printed paper altogether and wait to see the local news when it hits the online world?

For now, I’ll stay a loyal subscriber where I am – the Wall Street Journal serves me well each morning, and the Belleville News Democrat on the weekends. I’d love to see what’s being delivered for our local news, but we’ll have to wait and see if they can ever actually deliver a paper. I have a lot of good friends in journalism, and a lot of good clients in the media business. They work hard and do a good job. But in this critical moment in the history of their news, the mis-steps add up, and they’ll need to work hard on minimizing them to survive into another generation.

Update, 10/26/2011:

A quick update: After tweeting this entry and a couple of emails yesterday, I received confirmation that I was set to go, and I DID receive our first paper this morning. Thanks to those who finally made this happen. Hopefully subscribing is faster and easier for others!

(Photo: Flickr: nateone)

The Hub Magazine’s “Alive and Clicking: Retailer websites are surprisingly strong as a shopper marketing tool” caught my eye in my RSS Reader the other day. They do still very much matter, as my clients can explain. As the data in the article shows, for many audiences, a retailer’s core website and its promotional space are ripe opportunities for the retailer and for their consumer packaged goods partner vendors. The retailer website still rocks as a channel: “28 percent of shoppers use retailer websites, compared to just 12 percent who visit a retailer’s social-media page, 10 percent who use coupons loaded onto a loyalty card, five percent who subscribe to text messages from retailers and three percent who use mobile apps while shopping in a store.” For moms, the main value is introducing new stores, brands and products. For young men, it’s promoting electronics: “…when targeting Moms on retail websites, manufacturers will achieve a higher response by introducing them to a new store or a new brand. However, while Moms and Boomers are more likely to be influenced by discounts, they are not as likely to be motivated to stray from their pre-planned purchases. While Men, 18-24, are very responsive to marketing on retailer websites, marketing electronics products will have the highest impact.” About that mom opportunity alone? “Almost 40 percent of Moms said they buy brands they never purchased before based on their visit to retailer websites.”

I was the instigator in a pretty cool scenario last week in social media. [As an aside, I must say: I’ve been a Facebook guy for several years now, and just recently started to dive into Twitter feet first, and this scenario would only have been possible on Twitter, as @jimmaiella noted today in “Thoughts on Twitter“.] Here’s the story: A few weeks ago, I was fortunate to take part in “The Engagement Metric“, a fantastic one-day forum on Engagement in the Media with journalists & other interested parties from around the country and world. It was hosted by the University of Missouri Columbia (“Mizzou”) and the Reynolds Journalism Institute, by RJI Fellow Joy Mayer (Twitter @mayerjoy). I had been introduced to Joy by my friend and former coworker Nicole Hollway, GM of the St. Louis Beacon (Twitter @nicolehollway). While “The Engagement Metric” was a fantastic event that’ll warrant its own post sometime soon (although already well-documented by James Janega (@JamesJanega) of the Chicago Tribune’s Trib Nation in his “Smart People on the Prairie: Musing on a Future for Journalism“, that’s not what I want to share here. I’d like to share a story about last week, after #RJIengage was over. I really like Seth Godin’s May 16 post “The Future of the Library“. Enough to share it on Twitter. Joy replied that she like the read, and linked to a write-up she had produced regarding a conference she had attended about the journalist+library crossover:

It immediately made me think of a blog that I have followed and been fascinated by for years – David Lee King’s space on the Social Web & Emerging Trends in Libraries. (@DavidLeeKing). What happened next was something akin to planting a seed in the spring, watering it, and watching it spring to life before your eyes:

Having helped make that connection between two Big Thinkers in the realm of media, journalism, libraries, and our communities was pretty awesome and humbling. That was last Monday. But it gets crazier – and better. Really. Last Wednesday, David Tweeted that he was in Columbia, MO checking out the Daniel Boone Regional Library. Joy noticed – and mentioned that she was heading there too. Check this out:

That, I think, truly puts the “Social” into the “Social Media”. It also speaks volumes to what a Small World this really is. Monday = introduction of two great minds in a similar space of work and thought. Wednesday = chance in-person meeting, facilitated by this thing called Twitter. What do you think about that?  

Out of about 300 headlines in my RSS Reader yesterday, a few really caught my eye and got me thinking – one in particular: Business Insider’s article The Brick-And-Mortar Retail Store Is Headed For Extinction (The Evolution of the Retail Store).

Stories like that one really catch my attention, since most of my time in my day-to-day consulting gig is spent with retail & travel companies – typically the big, legacy, brick & mortar establishments.

This morning, another, similar story passed through my reader: Amazon.com Now Selling More Kindle Books Than Print Books.

It was really interesting to catch those two articles on each others’ heels. Sure, there are dozens more stories every day just like them, but out of the whole stream, I thought that those two, together, summed up the current state of affairs in the Physical to Digital Transition quite nicely.

I don’t agree fully with Business Insider in the somewhat sensational headline that the “retail store is headed for extinction.” I do agree that it’s changing, and will continue to change. Data shows that at every turn. I agree with some of their ideas for how it changes (that it becomes smaller, becomes a marketing footprint, etc.) That begs further questions, though – if “marketing” owns the store footprint, what’s the trade off? What other legacy marketing channels lose funding as a result?

[Full disclosure: I don’t work with Amazon as a client, but I work with other retailers, and Amazon is a client of ours… I have peers who work with them.]

Ah, the spirit of “Hello world!” That pretty much encapsulates what brings me here, so I’m not even going to change the default title of this very first WordPress post.

I’ve blogged on and off since 1997. I started on a platform I created for myself (complete with “Geekpoints” friends could earn by logging in and interacting, then exchange for cool stuff) for my first site: MikeHalbrook.com [now defunct] (which grew out of my old, old “Mike’s World” on AOL [now defunct].) Later, I would dabble with faith-based writing on brands like BreadAlive [now defunct] and Sirach3 [now defunct], and even on our personal/family blog at Halbrook.net.

Over time, I’ve realized that most of the personal stuff I want to share has a place with a limited audience of friends at Facebook. My professional experiences and thoughts and gathered trinkets deserve their own place. Much of the rest of the world is doing that collecting on sites like Tumblr, but I’m not going to give them my professional content, so that brings us full circle to where we started: Here.

This is going to be where I toss links that interest me or that I just want to remember, a random photo from my travels, or a random thought about some online, marketing, or analysis topic.

I hope you enjoy and find something of value here.

Welcome… and Hello world!