Word on the blogosphere (and in the San Francisco Chronicle and elsewhere) is that Wired Magazine had a Collection Agency send threatening letters to individuals whose subscription had lapsed. Chris Anderson, Editor in Chief of Wired Magazine, responded on his Long Tail blog. An excerpt from his post:
The reason turned out to be that they were among the small fraction of our subscribers who signed up for an automatically-renewing subscription under the bill-me option, rather than the usual credit card option, and then didn't send in a $12 check at the end of their billing cycle. They thought, quite reasonably, they were just letting their subscription lapse and were not aware that they had signed up for the auto-renew plan, probably because the details of the subscription plans are not marked as clearly as they could be.
This was really distressing to hear for all sorts of reasons, not the least of which is that sending letters from a collection agency for $12 is a poor way to treat customers. But the good news is that it has clarified a problem that we can fix, and for that we're grateful to the Chronicle.
He went on to say that he's working with Conde Nast Circulation to fix this right away and happened to mentioned that it was too hard to auto-subscribe by credit card as well as determine information about your own account. I agreed with those points and fired off an email to him. He responded very quickly, saying thanks and that he'd have circulation follow-up with me on a CC autorenew.
And I didn't even have to tell him that I owned every Wired Magazine issue ever printed for him to respond!