I work for a news company right now. Or rather, the parent company of a local news, similar to Gannett (the company that was mentioned in the article). I've fo

I work for a news company right now. Or rather, the parent company of a local news, similar to Gannett (the company that was mentioned in the article). I've found that we have a lot of freedom, and we've recently deployed a redesigned website that we're happy with. There's definitely been a lot of frustration from arguing with all the different departments: advertising, circulation, editorial / the newsroom, but the most frustrating aspect by far has been the technical debt we still have yet to address properly. Software that was purchased by our company several years ago for managing subscribers and their subscriptions is abysmal. It's used far beyond its scope, where generic "notes" fields are used to store critical information. For example, these systems are for print subscriptions only, so they amortize billing, and there's no email address field. We've shoehorned online subscription functionality by including email addresses in the notes field. There's no API or any sort of way to truly interact with these "systems" either, so customers are just flat-out unable to manage their own account without some middle-man manually entering form-submitted data. Truthfully I feel that even with our redesigned website (which has gotten overwhelmingly positive reviews), we still suffer from an awful online presence. What sort of subscription service exists these days that doesn't even let you change your address without calling? It's pretty sad.