I understand newspapers need to make money. There isn't much ad revenue left in the age of craigslist, spam, and the World Wide Web. But the Los Angeles Times and Washington Post have
both put up paywalls that prevent me reading news stories. If they think I am going to give money to the house organs of fascism, they are profoundly mistaken.
Don't forget the New York Times.
ReplyDeleteJust remember the websites weren't programmed by very good programmers. Their pay-walls can be defeated remarkably easily. Several different methods are out in the wild and available.
ReplyDeleteI about roll on the floor every time I see that the newsrags are hurting for income, due to C-List. Started by a group of left-wingers, they have nearly singlehandedly sunk the worlds papers by taking away their classified ad revenue. Talk about a self-inflicted wound! And when Ebay bought out one of the original founders, C-list made sure they had no say in how it gets run. Things can get weird here in the Bay Area.
ReplyDeleteThey don't advertise it, but the Washington Post offers free subscriptions to anyone with an ".edu" email. If you have one from your teaching job, you should be all set.
ReplyDeleteThe NY Times does not offer one for free, but does offer a very substantial discount for ".edu" email addresses.
Unfortunately to avouid being Obamacare punished, my college had to remove all adjuncts not currently teaching from email. So until they have history class demand enough to bring me back, probably in 2017....
ReplyDeleteGenerally most news sites offer a small number of articles per month as a teaser to get you to subscribe and they use cookies to track you and the number of articles accessed. To abuse that feature, run in private or incognito mode when you want to browse their sites. I tend to use those modes anyway as I don't appreciate tracking.
ReplyDelete(Yes, the number of things I do to pollute the attempts at website tracking is large, but the number of things that websites do to track people is larger still and intrusive.)