Free-dom of the Press

It looks like I have finally beat the system. (Side joke here: In Russia, you don’t beat system. System beats you! Hey-oh!)

As documented in a post from earlier this spring, we here at YAB are not against the way of the freebie, the hand-out, or the special offer. If unspecified Company ABC wants to offer me a free trial of anything in hopes of enticing me to further my purchasing relationship with their firm, I’ll take them up on it, only to cancel slightly before the trial’s deadline. (By the way, Company ABC is a stupid name for a business, you guys really should have tried harder, hypothetically speaking.)

However, the key to any free trial is the cancellation of said trial before the crafty accounts processing can change the “free” part to “boatload of cash.” My most recent endeavor into sticking it to the man occurred back in April. The reason? I wanted to read NFL draft insider columns to get a better idea of who the Eagles were thinking about picking with the 14th pick. The mark?

ESPN.com

Though I hate to admit it, this is an extremely clever way for TV news channels to make some quick cash. Reserve a certain number of columnists for an “exclusive” section of your website, and con data-hungry schmoes into paying $9.95 a month to yes, (here comes the fun part,) READ. They find stuff out they probably would have found out 24 hours from now, but hey, they’re the first in Cubeville to know, and they think it’s money well spent. Hey, for two weeks and for free, I can be a schmoe.

The way this particular trial worked was that you sign up and cancel at any time before the two weeks are up, and you have no further obligations. Sign up on a monthly or yearly basis, it doesn’t matter really, as long as you remember to cancel. So I signed up for a year at 60 bucks, and this even included a year’s subscription to ESPN: The Magazine. And even if you cancel before you owe, you’ll get to keep the first issue FREE. (Yeah, because there are so many other companies that make you return it. I’ve never understood that selling point.)

However, in all the things that come with “taking your grad school finals,” sure enough, I forgot to cancel before the deadline, and before I could say Dikembe Mutombo, I had a $60 bill to pay on the old credit card.

Not to be done in, I frantically called ESPN to cancel my subscription. I was hoping one of the Sports Center anchors, or at the least, Baseball Tonight’s John Kruk would be manning the phones. Anyone but Dick Vitale. Not surprisingly, they’ve got other employees to handle people like me. I canceled the Insider subscription and got a credit for the same amount back to the credit card, nullifying the mistake. They didn’t even charge me for the 3 days of the year I had used. (yes, that would be 49 cents. Twenty-four more and I might be able to buy a candy bar.)

So no, I no longer have any access to exclusive, premium content to ESPN.com. I’m not on the cutting edge of sports news as it happens. I have gone back to reading the athletic press of the masses. All in all, ESPN.com had me right where they wanted me, and now I have nothing.

So can someone please explain why I’ve gotten ESPN The Magazine for free the last four months?