http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20060204/...k_media_boston
BOSTON (Reuters) - The Boston Globe has been swamped by nearly 50,000 telephone calls from worried readers since it
accidentally delivered hundreds of thousands of subscribers' credit card numbers with its newspapers, the paper said on Friday.
The Massachusetts attorney general is investigating if laws were broken and local legislators have seized on last Sunday's blunder to drum up support for initiatives aimed at better protecting consumers from identity theft.
Richard Gilman, the Globe's publisher, has apologised to subscribers after 215,000 credit card numbers were printed on the back of paper used to wrap newspaper bundles distributed to newspaper retailers in central Massachusetts.
By Friday afternoon, the newspaper said more than 48,800 subscribers had telephoned the newspaper, forcing its managers to pull employees from other departments to answer the phones, according to a report on its Web site.
A Boston Globe spokesman said the number of people cancelling subscriptions to the 134-year-old newspaper since Tuesday when the mistake was publicly announced has been small, though he declined to give a figure.
By Friday, unauthorised purchases had been made with only four credit cards using the private numbers released by the Globe and its regional publication Worcester Telegram & Gazette, Globe spokesman Al Larkin said.
But the mistake, coming at a time when confidence in the media industry has been shaken by several journalism scandals, could cost the paper some readers, said Robert Zelnick, chairman of Boston University's journalism department.
"There will be an effect for the Globe," said Zelnick. "Many readers will not distinguish between administrative personnel mistakes and mistakes by journalists, and that means in the short run they will lose some readership."
It also comes at difficult time for the Pulitzer Prize-winning newspaper that is struggling to hold on to advertisers and readers amid growing Web-based competition.
The mistake at the city's most respected paper, first published in 1872, follows errors with customer data reported at a major U.S. bank and an online brokerage that also stirred concerns of identity theft.