From MediaNews, according to this article on the Washington Business Journal site, the newspaper industry thinks they should be exempt from national “do-not-call” regulations proposed by the Federal Trade Commission. Newspaper Association of America CEO John Sturm says: “With nearly 60 percent of new subscription sales generated by telemarketing — the single largest source of new subscribers — imposing these onerous and unnecessarily restrictive requirements on newspaper telemarketing activities” would hurt the industry without giving customers any new protections.
While I’d usually support newspapers in most everything they do, this is absolutely ridiculous. I get phone calls regularly from the Bend Bulletin, trying to get me to subscribe. I’m not a subscriber, but even when I was, I’d get calls from them nearly weekly — which was far more often than AT&T or Sprint called me. I canceled my subscription and started reading their news online (their site needs some work, but that’s another beef entirely). But why the newspaper industry would want to be involved in the same kinds of infamous practices that the long distance telephone industry is known for (an industry that is known for screwing people) is beyond me.