Count Me Among the 8M NY Times Subscribers Receiving Screwy Email

Even the headline above a “Media Decoder” item on the New York Times website about their colossal foul-up today is misleading. “The Times E-Mails Millions by Mistake to Say Subscriptions Were Canceled” implies it was the Times did the bogus canceling. In fact, the confusing email was addressed to “Dear Home Delivery Subscriber,” and in a supplicant’s voice said how sorry the Times was that I had canceled my subscription, but that I could rejoin the ranks of Times subscribers at a special low rate. Of course, I hadn’t canceled the paper, nor had the approximately 8,000,000 others who received the same message.

The Times hasn’t adequately explained how such an enormous screw-up could have occurred, and their attempts at damage control have been as insufficient as the original email was incorrect. Just as I noted the headline above was misleading, so too was the Times’ first report on the incident. On Twitter they reported, “If you received an e-mail today about canceling your New York Times subscription, ignore it. It’s not from us.” A few hours later they had to admit this too was wrong; the message hadn’t been spam, it really had come from the newspaper. Reflexively blaming spam for the transmission of an email to 8,000,000 readers, when it was supposed to go to 300, is bad form.

I want to add that this afternoon I was on Facebook threads with two different friends and their sets of Fb friends as we all tried to figure out what nutty business was going on at the Times. Late in the afternoon, I mentioned on each thread that similar, parallel threads had been going on all afternoon, which struck me as amusing moment of meta-media reality.

Below is a complete visual rundown of the Times’ inadvertent hilarity today, in three screen-shots I’ve made. I’ve looked for the tweet that blamed it all on spam, but I can’t locate it on the Internet. Maybe the Times deleted it from their tweet-stream. If I find it, or someone else’s screen-shot of it, I’ll post it here too.