The Charleston Gazette annoys me of late. I guess that means the Daily Mail does too, but that's probably a given.
It's been a process. I used to subscribe to the paper, as recently as 2007. At some point prior to that, I realized the only day I read the paper was Sunday, the other days' editions ending up in the recycling bin unread. Fortunately you can subscribe to Sundays only so I changed my subscription to match my lifestyle. Over time the Gazette and Daily Mail combined their efforts into a merged Saturday edition and offered it alongside the Sunday edition for the same price. But after giving it a few weeks, I found it was little more than a glorified sports program and, by fiat, declared it DOA.
It's good to be king.
Anyway, that's not what did it. What did it was their billing department. I've got almost all the household bills automated. This came partly from the desire to free up the actual time I spent paying bills, and partly because I felt (and feel) getting mailed paper bills in the 21st century was (and is) stupid and inefficient. The Gazette ended up on an ATM card for some reason... I've forgotten why or how, but it did. And it stayed there for years, working just fine, and the payment got zapped out automatically without fail. Until the card expired.
Apparently, getting the Gazette to bill to a new card number is roughly equivalent to solving a Rubik's Cube blindfolded. They managed to bill the new card number — once — then started sending out paper bills like a Nixon-era company. So I just didn't pay them, and as a result, the newspaper stopped coming. One morning shortly after this, the delivery person put a piece of black electrical tape on the paper delivery box, as if it were an errant cow in need of a branding iron. And although I removed that little piece of tape because I didn't like the way it looked, that was the end of newspapers coming to my house.
The paper box sits largely vacant now, though at two separate points this summer, I discovered the nests of animals inside it — birds the first time, wasps the second. Curious that both these animals can use paper to build their nests.
This weekend, the Charleston Newspapers website took a flying leap off the digital cliff and didn't get back up for about seven hours. It did eventually come back up, but not until after this perfectly-timed Facebook comment from Steven Allen Adams:
Hey, the Charleston Gazette website is down, but Kanawha Valley Live is working just fine. Come on over. http://kvlive.net/
This isn't the first of the Gazette's website woes. Earlier this year, the site was serving out malware via one of its advertising networks. Speaking of which, Mr. Owl wants to know: how many popups does it take to pay the bills? Looks like at least two, and one giant slider from C&O Motors. So three? Three.
You know, I really don't mean to shit on the local newspaper. I've worked for a couple of them so I feel an affinity, and there really is some good stuff to be found at the Gazette (and maybe even the Daily Mail). And, I read recently (and can't remember where, dammit!) that a local press is perhaps the ordinary citizen's last defense against unbridled police brutality — a statement whose profundity mustn't be overlooked.
But with stunts like this, they make it far too easy.