WSJ subscription system is broken

Felix Salmon of Conde Nast Portfolio writes Wednesday about the difficulties he has had in switching his Wall Street Journal subscription from a U.S. delivery to a European delivery.

Salmon writes, “You’d think it should be relatively easy to suspend my WSJ subscription in New York, and replace it with a WSJ Europe subscription here. But you’d be wrong.

“Suspending a WSJ subscription in the US for longer than 90 days is non-trivial, but doable, with a single phone call. That’s the easy bit. But the US people can’t help you with the European paper: the two editions don’t talk to each other. If you want a subscription to the WSJ Europe, you have to set up a whole new account. Once you’ve done that, your paper eventually starts arriving — a day late, in mid-afternoon, in your mailbox. Stories from the US edition of the WSJ often make it into the European edition the following day, so news which breaks on Monday in the US might get reported in Tuesday’s WSJ, and Wednesday’s WSJ Europe — which then arrives on Thursday in your European mailbox. This is not timely.

“When you phone up to find out what’s going on, they say that they do have hand delivery in Berlin, but not, it seems, to Mitte — or at least not to the bit of Mitte where I’m living. OK, well, never mind, I never liked the WSJ Europe that much anyway, I’ll make do with my online access, I am a blogger after all.

“Until, one morning, you go to check a news story, and find it blocked:

“Your subscription to the Online Journal is no longer active.”

Read more here.