Funny, a lot of folks who are not me do not buy the notion that the cash-strapped UPoR went trolling for the city of Charlotte’s 20,000-strong email subscriber list in order to “improve journalism.” Here’s UPoR editor Rick Thames doing his best Nathan Thurm with WFAE’s heroic Julie Rose.

But even more damning is local PR maven Scott Hepburn’s patient takedown of the UPoR’s move:

# This isn’t in the spirit of permission-based marketing. Even if the Observer is within its legal rights to obtain and use the emails, that doesn’t mean it should. Permission-based marketing is about consumer choice. Citizens did not give the Observer permission to contact them.

# This violates the relationship between Charlotte residents and their government. When a citizen provides an email to a municipal agency, it is with the assumption the email address will not be shared with third parties. The Observer is manipulating a flawed law to breach that trust. It’s likely to make residents think twice about communicating with their public servants.

# It’s about marketing, contrary to what Thames says. Email lists of that size are an email marketers gold mine. If you think a newspaper that’s in a steep financial decline will keep the list off limits to its own marketing department, you’re crazy.

# And for that matter, what’s to say The Observer won’t sell that list to advertisers, or give them access to it as part of an ad deal?

# If the newspaper wants to build better journalism, as Thames claims the email acquisition will enable it to do, it should stop laying off professional journalists. It should also compensate any citizen journalist who provides content.

# The Observer already has a way to contact readers. It’s called a newspaper. If the city’s email lists are the best way to ask readers for feedback on the Observer’s reporting, maybe we oughtta question how effective newspapers are?

And for the record, here’s my email exchange with Steve Gunn, the paper’s contact person for the request:

Steve —

I am compelled to ask — Will you be using any emails you receive from the city to develop, market, build any sort of distribution list for MNI products and/or services? Was this request made as part of a news inquiry or a business-side inquiry? If news, what is the general focus of proposed piece — effectiveness and scope of city online communication? Did you also request the number of unique visitors (monthly, weekly, daily) to charmeck.org? If not, why? Have you made a similar email subscriber list requests of Mecklenburg County, CMS, or any other governmental entity?

Thanks.

Jeff A. Taylor
meckdeck.com

Hi Jeff –

We’re planning to use the email for journalistic purposes, including seeing if citizens are interested in joining the Public Insight Network, our online tool to try and get more “citizen experts” into the paper and online. We also might ask about rating city government services, for example.

We would not sell the list. We would not use it for advertising. We would allow people to opt-out. At this point, we’ve just requested it and nothing is going to happen quickly.

I have not asked for traffic counts from that website. Should I?

One point, you might want to explore, is when people sign up for a government email list, what are they told in terms of public information. Are they informed it is a matter of public record?

Steve

So maybe that is the end of it. Or maybe not.