I Was Tortured By The Times Of London

One of the joys of living in the US is the sheer convenience of it all. Sometimes that convenience is so much a part of the American experience that it only becomes obvious in its absence. Let me explain by example.

Part of my morning ritual for most of my adult life has been to have a cup of coffee and read the morning paper. Living in West Hollywood for 20 years I would greet each day with a large hot cup of freshly ground coffee and the newspaper, which would be waiting for me outside my door.

Now I’m an early riser but even at 530 or 600 in the morning the paper would be waiting for me. The only real risk the paper took on its way to my doorstep was the weekly ritual of grabbing it before the automatic sprinklers turned on and reduced it to a sodden rag.

In hindsight, what I took for granted was, apparently, a remarkable consistency of service. We had earthquakes, including the great Northridge quake, fires that swept through vast sections of the city, and the Rodney King riots which cause the National Guard to park tanks on every street corner. Yet, the indefatigable paper boy somehow still delivered that paper every morning, early in the morning, without fail.

Thus, it was with those adamantine expectations, I arrived in the UK, in Great Shelford to be exact, and ordered home delivery of The Times. Great Shelford if you do not know the village perches on the edge of the city of Cambridge and in American terms would be called a “neighbourhood”; its village-like qualities being more evidenced in spirit than any differentiated geography.

So there I am in what is apparently the remote country side (approximately ½ a mile from the city boundary) and I found myself unable to get anything like a newspaper at a decent hour in the morning, or for that matter every morning.

You may rightly say that I am winging over nothing at all. If a paper comes at 830 or 9 which it did, when it came at all, is not the stuff of real hardship. But if my opportunity to read a paper has passed by 830, then it’s not really a service at all is it?

When we moved last autumn from the remote recesses of the city edge smack dab into the centre of town I thought that the problem would solve itself. We now live so close to the centre of town that I sometimes lapse into an English accent out of a desire to make the Japanese tourists feel they’ve got their money’s worth.

And have things improved? I’m sorry to say that they haven’t. If anything, it’s gotten worse. The fellow who delivers our paper is a nice enough guy. And when he gets around to delivering us the paper, say around 9AM, he seems happy enough. He is certainly more reliable than the churning workface out in the deep fens on the edge of town.

But the paper still remained a useless service to me and the fleck it interposed on the clear glass surface of my life, pricked at me like an un-scratched itch.

Now I would not say that the sole reason I bought an iPad was with the expectation that I could download the Times or another newspaper with digital reliability and at an early hour. But it played, I admit, an overly large role…

So how disappointed, no not disappointed, that doesn’t capture the sentiment; how outraged and incensed and bewildered have I been to find that the Times in their infinite wisdom appear to have set a time delay on their digital version to only begin downloading at 630?

If I open the Times iPad App at 5AM their newsstand is bare. At 6 it’s still bare. At 6:29 no one has shown up. But for reasons only known to the Times at 630 they have decided Im allowed to receive delivery of their virtual product that has no cost of delivery and no earthly reason for not being available earlier.

Why? Why? Why? What marketing idiot with nothing better to do came up with this wheeze? Presumably one who sleeps in? For god’s sake man, its DIGITAL. It’s not like you have to do anything. Is there a perverse joke going on in the distribution department of the Times to make people feel at home by not increasing the level of service? “Oh dear, we’d better not let them get it any earlier they might grow accustomed to that. Or even worse, they might realize we wrote the whole bloody thing the night before. That would never do”

C’mon folks. The most modest aspiration a digital product should have is that it is freed from the physics of tangible goods. Let it take flight. How will you ever do anything innovative with your product if you can’t even do the prosaic?

News Corp all I can say is that your sense of innovation would be pedestrian if it were ambulatory at all.