They’re Just Like You: New Yorker Staff Writers Complain About How Hard it is to Access Your New Yorker Account

Leia IdlibyNov 2nd, 2020, 3:21 pm
 

Roy Rochlin/Getty Images

Staff of the New Yorker took to Twitter to complain about how difficult it is navigate a New Yorker subscriber’s account — even if you write for the magazine.

“I’ve tried 5 times over the past month to renew my subscription to the magazine I happen to write for only to end up in a limbo of ‘one moment please,'” New Yorker writer Patrick Radden Keefe said in a Twitter post. “Imagine the surge in revenue if we could just devise an interface that didn’t prevent people from giving us their money.”

The New Yorker has faced backlash for its difficult-to-manage subscription service before. Last year, Nieman Lab documented the raft of complaints that the Condé Nast magazine just couldn’t keep paying subscribers logged in. The magazine’s online subscription often confuses subscribers for “users,” hitting them with a paywall and blocking them from articles.

The post from Keefe prompted other members of the New Yorker staff to share their own troubles with the magazine’s notoriously tricky subscription service.

“Sigh. Seldom in my life have I felt more absurd than when calling the New Yorker subscription hotline for assistance. And I have felt absurd many times,” wrote New Yorker music critic Alex Ross. 

The New Yorker’s Jiayang Fan revealed that she had issues reading one of her own articles this week, while other writers, including Philip Gourevitch and Jane Mayer, also voiced their issues with their subscriptions to the magazine:

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