Some newspaper publishers don’t make easy for newsagents to manage the home delivery process. While News Ltd and Fairfax (belatedly) gave newsagents warning, some rural publishers only announced their plans Easter late yesterday – leaving their newsagents scrambling to get IT systems adjusted at less than 24 hours notice.
The time wasted making these last minute adjustments and printing new one off delivery run lists takes newsagents away from managing Easter trade. And publishers wonder why newsagents don’t comply with their requests.
On an average week newsagents receive between thirty and fifty important communications from suppliers which require action. This is on top of usual communications. Throw last minute notice about handling Easter into the mix and no wonder some newspapers don’t get delivered.
Publishers need to streamline how they communicate with newsagents. Newsagents ought to demand this. The current approach sets newsagents up to fail.
Last year I proposed something I called One Calendar – a common calendar based interface between suppliers and newsagents. Only one supplier put their hand up as interested even though it would have worked with all IT systems and offered an each IT interface between suppliers and newsagent computer systems.
It seems to me that some suppliers prefer to keep newsagents beavering away with archaic business practices.
The publisher monitoring site (An earlier article you had on BLOG)that newsagents and distrutors use in the UK could incorporate a register of reliable and prompt communication from publishers as well as the delivery times. If this information was available to newsagents everywhere – then publishers would be shamed into complying. We monitor our delivery times and haven’t considered their communication – but I will implement that now. We would support an Australian Version.
Regards
David Mill Kallangur News.