While I applaud News Limited for commenting on my recent blog posts here about their move to add a 80 cent surcharge to each copy of The Advertiser they deliver to select parts of regional South Australia, their comments reinforce a view that newsagent suppliers don’t like it when newsagents publicly disagree with them.
I regularly hear about suppliers disagreeing with something I have written here. I’m often told by someone inside the supplier’s business. When I suggest they comment publicly the response is often – they don’t want to legitimise your blog post.
We, newsagents and suppliers, need to be able to disagree and debate publicly for it is only through robust honest discourse that we can have a hope of finding some fair and just common ground.
Newsagents and suppliers don’t have to like each other, we don’t have to be friends. We need to respect each other and be fair in our dealings with each other.
Hiding debate, keeping it confidential, stifling it or restricting it to behind the back carping only serves the person or business engaged in that.
While I don’t care what people think of what I write, hearing about complaints behind my back makes me sad as that very act is a demonstration of a lack of interest in engaging on the topic.
Newsagent suppliers genuinely interested in the future of our channel can show this by welcoming debate with newsagents and engaging in public debate and discussion respectfully, seeking genuine common ground.
News has at least commented here and for that they deserve credit. That they have ignored the core issues and have used their comments to spin the issues is frustrating and does not serve their cause well.
All this leaves me with the question – do newsagency suppliers not want to publicly debate key issues with us?
NOTE: Any supplier is welcome to comment here at any time. Once the first comment is made all future comments are unmoderated.
Mark, as always you make a good point here, suppliers particularly newspaper publishers don’t like talking to their retailer estate about difficult issues in public. My experience with publishers in the UK was that they would only talk to retailers individually in private.
I think publishers see retailers as their chattel, only in business for the publishers advantage to be plundered at will.
Steve, how did/do newsagents and the NFRN deal with this in the UK?
Talk about contentious supply issues.
This morning I received Selector magazine
from Network. It was Delay Billed (DB)
30/9.
However, when I took the old issue off
the shelf I noticed it was DB 20/6.
I have requested the matter be looked into
but if it is correct (downloaded via edixchangeit) then we have to hang on to
the old copy for another month before we
can put it in returns.
This is simply unacceptable from a storage point of view also causes errors getting the
job finished with no worries about missing
something when it IS due for return.
I wouldn’t mind if this was a “once only” occurrence but I am noticing it more and more.
June you can early return delay billed titles. The account reconciliation is done when it is due to be billed.
Mark this is a very important article. I agree newsagent suppliers don’t want debate. I’d go further and say our representatives like vana and the anf don’t want debate either. All we get is we’re in discussion.
It’s time we stood up for ourselves.
Thanks Jeff. We need to guide our suppliers to be more transparent with us and public debate is a start.