Why I Didn’t Subscribe To The International Herald Tribune, But What They Could Do To Get Me

Philip M. Stone November 4, 2009 Follow on Twitter

It was an offer too good to pass up – four weeks free subscription to the International Herald Tribune (IHT) with no strings attached – but after four weeks I turned down the opportunity to subscribe at $1.44 daily (a 63% discount off the $4 daily newsstand price). But if the IHT really wants my business then there’s just one thing it needs to do additionally and then it might just get me.

A few years back and the IHT used to be a daily read at the office, but since those long gone days there has not been a daily newspaper at home. Dare I say it, I have relied on the Internet for most of my news fix and have few complaints. So getting used to a daily newspaper delivered to the door was a whole new experience and the immediate lesson to be learned by the industry is that when a newspaper loses a reader/subscriber the longer that person stays away the harder it is to get that person  back. I discovered that my daily schedule no longer called for the Daily Read. The newspapers piled up and then got read over the weekend, or even the next weekend. Which brought forth the question that if that is how my weekly print fix is going to be then why mess with the IHT, just subscribe to The Economist or such and have a handy weekly package at hand.

Putting that aside, let’s deal with the product at hand. Now admittedly I am an old-timer when it comes to the IHT -- I liked it when it was co-owned with the Washington Post Company and therefore daily it really had the best that the New York Times, The Washington Post  plus The Los Angeles Times (from the Post-Times News Service) had to offer. Today, it bills itself as “the global edition of the New York Times”, and good as that might be it is not as good having all three as before.  There is more modernization today – there is now front page color – but they got rid of  the dingbat. Dingbat? That was the panorama of images featuring pyramids and camels, an ox pulling a plow, a bridge, an hourglass an airplane, a bald eagle atop a clock stopped at 6:12 right there in the middle of the logo, yes, that dingbat which seemed to give the IHT its personality. When the dingbat disappeared last year, so did the personality.  

But let’s put all of that aside and deal with subject matter, and that was the biggest difficulty of all. The IHT is what it calls itself – an international newspaper – that is distributed mostly throughout Europe and Asia. So who are its targets? Americans living overseas? Not really, although the sports pages do have an American bias. Is it the senior level businessman? More likely, for there certainly are a lot of business and business oriented stories. You almost have the impression that as the Wall Street Journal is trying to become more generalist, The New York Times, and thus the IHT, is becoming more business oriented.

A recent edition had a front page story headlined, “Getting Set For Takeoff: Cheap Flights over Atlantic”. Now, that got my attention.  But there were few other stories that did. And it got me to thinking that my main interest these days is how news affects me personally. So while it’s interesting to know that “NATO backs new strategy for the war in Afghanistan”  the cheaper flights over the Atlantic is the story that really caught the eye. But, unfortunately, those kinds of stories were few and far between. And while there was a very nice front-page artistic Reuters four-column picture of a woman kneeling in a Budapest cemetery on the 54th anniversary of the Hungarian uprising, was that really what I wanted?

And then there were the ads. We all know it’s not just news that readers are interested in, it’s also the ads. Well, on the front page, and pages two and three of a recent issue the ads were by expensive Swiss watch brands – not in my budget! On page 5 a big Cartier color ad for diamonds. Not in my budget! And then on the back page – you guessed it, an ad for an expensive Swiss watch. On the culture and arts  pages there were display ads for some exhibitions – fine if you are in those cities – but basically in my case there was a basic disconnect between advertiser and reader – in fact worse than that the message was very clear --  I don’t have the reader demographics the newspaper’s advertisers are looking for.  

So what this all told me is that at my time of life I don’t really want or need an international newspaper, what I need is a local newspaper with loads of stories about things that will affect my local life, and ads that tell me where I can save money in the local sales and the like. And that is the problem with  pan European or pan Asian news products – they serve large general audiences, whereas what most of us really want is the local report.

So does that mean I am lost to the IHT? No. There is a solution. The IHT is printed locally in many European countries, including my home of Switzerland, so why not for Swiss subscribers have a page of daily news about Switzerland (not about the UN offices in Geneva, but about Switzerland.) The occasional long feature is fine, but the emphasis should be on more briefer stories. Sounds ridiculous? Not really, for it is exactly that type of offering that the New York Times is experimenting with in the US. It has started a San Francisco Bay Area report on Fridays and Sundays – two pages each day about the Bay Area and the idea is that the cost of doing that will be covered by local advertising. Chicago is next.

It is still very early days, and the first edition of those Bay Area pages struck me that I would have preferred more stories shorter in length rather than the three long features and the four briefs. But it was a start. The IHT subscribes to the major international news agencies – surely between them there are a few stories each day about each European country? And if not there are enough local organizations that could fill in the slack, for an additional cost, of course. The question becomes whether the newspaper could sell enough local advertising to make all of that worthwhile, and answering that is why sales and marketing managers get paid the big bucks.

If I had an IHT I could relate to, a newspaper which told me news about where I live in addition to all else, then I would be interested.

But as things stand now, no.