Why I've Quit Doing Paid Election Coverage For The Mercury

Between 2013 and 2024 I covered four state and four federal elections via live blogging for The Mercury on contract on election night, as well as writing several commissioned articles in the leadup to various elections.  I enjoyed providing this coverage and working with The Mercury's reporters and staff on election nights tremendously.  I think The Mercury in general serves the population of Hobart well, as a rare example of a Murdoch tabloid that is not particularly slanted, and that the paper provides a lot of good coverage of local political matters.  I have high regard for several journalists who work there.  In general my relationship with The Mercury in this time has been excellent, albeit slightly strained at some state election times by some polling coverage issues (lack of transparency and detail around secretive local industry polls and passing off reader surveys as polls, for example).  One doesn't expect to have everything.  

However I have decided to end this association because the Mercury's online subscription system, and customer relations in the event of failure of that system, are so dreadful that I will not work for a company that continues to rip off its customers in this way.   I will think about options for future Tasmanian state and federal election night coverage, but probably not now, as I am very busy for the next few weeks.  It's sad to have had to move on from work I and many readers enjoyed in such disappointing circumstances, but it's time to do something else with my Tasmanian and federal election nights, whatever that may be.  

The background

On 23 March 2024 I covered the Tasmanian election night count for The Mercury and my partner bought an online discount subscription that after two months would increase to $15/per month in order to follow my coverage.  

Having no lasting use for the subscription, in May she wanted to cancel it prior to the increase commencing.  Aware that one (for whatever reason) needed to provide a week's notice to cancel a subscription without being billed, she attempted to do so online on 15 May and was confronted with a forest of "Something went wrong". The online cancellation option did not work (I believe it hasn't done so reliably for years).  

My partner rang up the phone cancellation service early on 16 May and was told that the subscription had been cancelled.  Yet on 17 May she was billed for it anyway with a payment deducted.  

Not only that, but this wasn't even treated as a late cancellation where one could still use the service for the final month; rather the service that she had been wrongly billed $15 for simply completely stopped working on its cancellation, meaning that she hadn't unwillingly bought an extra month's subscription with the $15 but had rather simply had the $15 taken.  

This resulted in me going on strike in terms of providing free political interviews to The Mercury, who I was previously being interviewed by for free many times in the average year (about 18 published cases in 2022, 15 in 2023 etc).   

It took a while for anyone at the Mercury to respond to my boycott at all but one gallant Mercury staffer did make several attempts to get the situation fixed, running into various brick walls of the sort involving us needing to ring up subscriptions ourselves (them ringing me up was all too hard) and so on.  Someone in the online subscriptions staff had also been putting around some nonsense about the cancellation date and the billing date being the same but this was false; we had the receipts on this and provided them.  That still didn't fix it.

When we did call the subscriptions number ourselves after all else failed on 12 July, after quite a while on the phone they eventually said that an error had indeed been made and the $15 would be refunded, but said it would probably take 2-3 weeks to refund the money, and maybe four.  (They were absolutely clear that the money would definitely be refunded.)

So a customer, and why is it so, has to give seven days notice to cancel a subscription, but if the Mercury wrongly bills a subscription it gets to hog the money for up to four weeks before returning it!  That's bad enough, but worse, eight weeks later the refund still hasn't arrived!

The strong feeling I have both from this and hearing of other "you can check out any time you like" experiences is that The Mercury views making it as hard as possible for aggrieved customers to get refunded as a feature not a bug.  

I will not work on contract for a company that treats its customers - including potentially other people who like my work - in this way.  Therefore I have decided to cease all commercial arrangements with The Mercury.  

This decision will be reviewed only if, as well as refunding the money with a personal apology to both of us,  the Mercury implements a working subscription cancellation system allowing for online cancellation any time on the day before the subscription renews or earlier.  The Mercury must also publish an editorial apologising to all victims of its inadequate cancellation system and for the lack of satisfactory dispute resolution services for subscribers.  The Mercury must create a complaints system with the power to ensure that appropriate refunds for customers ripped off by any further incompetence are processed immediately.  

While I may return to doing free political interviews for The Mercury, that will only be considered after the money has been refunded and we have received a written apology including notice that the money has been refunded.   I am not interested in discussing the matter further until both occur.

Newspapers maintain that paywalled coverage is the way to go, that readers should be paying for their articles and that readers shouldn't expect to get stuff for free.  They maintain that paywall-breaking and open reposting of copyright content are forms of theft.  And yet, they themselves steal from readers who are doing the right thing.

This is a disgusting and disgraceful double standard and it has to be brought to an end.