Metro

E-blues for Gray Lady

The New York Times was deluged yesterday with so many angry callers — who demanded the deep discounts they were promised in a massive e-mail foul-up — that it had to put a recorded apology on its main switchboard.

Callers had to listen to the mea culpa — twice.

“You may have received an e-mail today from The New York Times with the subject line ‘Important information regarding your subscription,’ ” the callers were told.

“This e-mail was sent in error. Please disregard the message. We apologize for any confusion this may have caused.”

Then the message repeated before callers could contact Times employees or departments.

The disastrous notification — which was sent out to 8.6 million e-mail addresses and offered a 50 percent discount for 16 weeks — sent the Times into a tailspin.

After the flood of calls began, the paper started giving the price break to people who complained — even if they had no plans to cancel and were already paying full price.

Times spokeswoman Eileen Murphy said the newspaper had stopped giving out discounts by early Wednesday afternoon — but she would not say how much the blunder has cost the company.

Legal experts said the paper has a moral, but not a legal, obligation to make good on the discount offer to all subscribers.

“I think if they were sensible, they would honor the offer,” said John Levine, author of “The Internet for Dummies” and president of the Committee Against Unsolicited Commercial Email.

“What newspaper doesn’t need more subscribers?” Levine said. “But do they have a legal obligation? I don’t think so. It was really a dumb mistake.”

Paul Levy, an attorney with the consumer-advocacy group Public Citizen, agreed that the blunder was “dumb” but said the only obligation the Times faces is moral.

He said to avoid “a loss of good will” it makes sense for the paper to honor the offer for everyone.

But the Times wouldn’t say whether it was taking that into consideration.

“We are not commenting beyond yesterday’s statement,” Murphy said. “To clarify, as the statement said, the e-mail was sent from The New York Times.”

That’s not what the paper said initially. After the deluge of phone calls began Wednesday, the Times erroneously told media reporters it had been the victim of spam.

The paper also tweeted the bad information: “If you received an e-mail today about canceling your NYT subscription, ignore it. It’s not from us.”

How the mistake occurred is still a mystery.

“Likely what happened is they were trying to mail to a select list, and the New York Times employee chose the full-member — rather than the retention-member — database,” said Matthew Verhout, a director at large with the Committee Against Unsolicited Email.
https://nypost.com/2011/12/30/e-blues-for-gray-lady/
nypost.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2021-49
336919
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:X47NFEMOGYVTWPFXCBJHJWSHW2V53XXS
<urn:uuid:c2ecd9c1-e12c-4716-b53a-877ea49316e0>
2021-11-30T22:41:33Z
192.0.66.32
text/html
sha1:UWTO53QAJHT6N7TGJPJIEX3BDO75CPFX
<urn:uuid:0e687ca2-6498-415f-84c6-fe64b22a0de1>
https://nypost.com/2011/12/30/e-blues-for-gray-lady/
response
<urn:uuid:9eead384-44b7-44fa-a02e-eee7d0d52cf2>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2021-49
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for November/December 2021
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-67-67-166
software: Apache Nutch 1.18 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 1.3-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: https://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/