Dear Wall Street Journal:
A friend of mine tried to share an article of yours with me. Sent me the link. I clicked on the link and got about two sentences with the rest held hostage against my subscribing to your otherwise decent publication.
I don’t subscribe under threats or coercion, and that’s what this behavior amounts to.
I tried to find a “contact us” — to let you know directly about how this tactic had back-fired, but that also failed.
If your product is actually worthy, share it and let me decide for myself if it is worth contributing to. How would that be different to my walking in to a doctor’s office and picking up a print copy some previous patient had left on the table? If I liked what I read, I would then subscribe.
To put it another way, it’s like I have a print copy of your paper and am anxious to share an article by one of your reporters / writers but every time I try to show it to someone else the paper goes mysteriously blank. If I was one of your writers, I would object most strenuously. If you give a writer / reporter a by-line, but then hold the article hostage against a ransom, does the author get a percentage of every subscription captured because of his article? (Cynical of me perhaps, but I sort of doubt it.)
Or are you afraid that your product won’t recommend itself if given a free and open hearing?
I don’t subscribe or purchase anything where the product is withheld in such a fashion. It’s a cheap tactic, based on a mostly unconscious behavior pattern in a majority of people. If you are still one of the few remaining True Newspapers (that is, dedicated to informing a thinking audience) do you really want to start your relationship with new subscribers by relying on such Pavlovian tactics?
Shame on you.
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