I'll get to subsidiarity in a minute. First, here is why I'm writing about it this morning.
For many years, I have subscribed to the Austin American-Statesman, first in its hard-copy paper form, and then when that got insupportably expensive, in its digital form only. Already by then, it was owned by a large media conglomerate called the Cox Media Group, but the operations and editorial control of the paper remained in Austin. An outfit called GateHouse Media bought it from Cox in 2018, but relatively little changed when the owners of GateHouse bought the company that ran USA Today, Gannett Media, and moved the Statesman under the Gannett umbrella. That caused some changes, but they were tolerable. Back in February 2025, however, Gannett sold the Statesman to Hearst Communications, another media conglomerate.
This may or may not have anything to do with what happened to me this week, but I suspect it does.
I've been accustomed to propping my iPad on the breakfast table and reading the "e-edition" of the Statesman along with having my cereal and orange juice. The software worked reasonably well most of the time, and until Wednesday of this week (Sept. 3) everything went smoothly.
Suddenly on Wednesday, I was asked for a password, and the system rejected it. After futilely trying to reset the password and getting no response from the paper's system, I called a help number and got connected to a man who said there was a software problem, and I should uninstall the Statesman app on my iPad and reinstall it.
I tried that Thursday, but it didn't help. Then I tried pretending I was a new subscriber (although I had found a place online which said my subscription was paid up until December of 2025), and tried to subscribe. That didn't even work.
Finally, I called the help line again. I spoke to one person, who silently connected me to another person, who sounded like she was working in a boiler room with fifteen other people crowded into a space the size of a VW bus.
She tried to identify me by name and phone number, and all those records had been lost. (This was also the case when I called the day before). Finally, she could locate me by street address, but it said I wasn't a subscriber. I asked if she could look up my subscription record to tell when it expired. She said because of the transfer to Hearst they didn't have that information, and would I like to subscribe now?
Seeing no other option, I said yes. I'd already spent about half an hour on the phone, and I figured this was the only way to get my paper back. It took about twenty minutes for her to take my information and put it in the system, and I could hear her asking for help in the background. Then it took another twenty minutes for me to log on and get my new subscription going, and we never could change the password they started me with.
The entire megilla cost me an hour of time I was not planning to spend, and $360 for a year's subscription to the e-edition only, which was the price point that made me cancel the hard-copy edition a few years ago. We've had some inflation since then, but not that much.
If there is anybody under 40 reading this, you are probably wondering why this old guy is insisting on paying that much money for stuff that I could get for free. Well, while I disagree with the editorial positions of the Statesman staff on most matters, it is still an edited entity that does a fairly good job of telling me what's been going on. And for another thing, you can't find that many comics all in one place on the internet for free, or if you can I don't know where to go.
Now for subsidiarity. It is a term from Catholic social teaching which describes the principle that "issues should be dealt with at the most immediate or local level that is consistent with their resolution." That's according to Wikipedia, and while that source is slanted on some matters, they are right on with this definition.
Going straight to my problem with the Statesman, most of the paper is written and edited thirty-five miles away up in Austin. The issue of my e-edition was a local issue, not going any farther in principle than Austin and San Marcos. The principle of subsidiarity says that the problem with my subscription, and the list of when I've subscribed, and my credit balance which has apparently vanished into the bit void, and my passwords, and whatever other stuff is relevant to the problem including the authority to do something about it, should all be right there in Austin, and not stuck in some anonymous server farm in Seattle and controlled from a boiler-room operation in God knows where, and owned by a corporation based in Manhattan which clearly doesn't give a flip about how it treats its new customers.
Simply because technology did not yet permit otherwise, newspaper operations prior to about 1970 had to be local, in accordance with the principle of subsidiarity. If my father had a problem with his subscription to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, he'd get on the phone and call their office downtown. A human being less than 20 miles away would answer the phone, and flip through physical pages of paper until he or she found the hand-written subscription records, and the issue would be resolved, or not. People made mistakes with paper records too, but they were more easily resolved. I have no idea what's gone wrong with my subscription to the Statesman, but again, only God knows exactly what the problem is, where all the loose ends are, and whether and how it can be resolved, because it's now so complex and involves incompatible computer systems and who knows what else.
I don't have an answer to this problem, except to point out that if we try moving toward systems that are more in accordance with the principle of subsidiarity, a lot of these kinds of problems might take care of themselves.
Sources: I referred to the Wikipedia articles on subsidiarity and the Austin American-Statesman
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