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The Rise Of Reg-Only Media

Posted by timothy on from the it's-easy-and-it's-the-law dept.

cswiii writes "Following up his article a few weeks ago about the NY Times' loss of prominence across the online medium (previously discussed on /.), Adam Penenberg returns with a much wider assault on the lurch towards reg-only content by Big Media as a whole. I just wonder what Margaret Thatcher would think about purportedly living in Beverly Hills..."

3 of 478 comments (clear)

  1. It needs to change by tepp · · Score: 5, Interesting

    It needs to change, and soon.

    I'm tired of registering at every news site I visit. With the populatiry of sites like Fark and Slashdot, I no longer go to only one news site - I visit articles in newspapers in Arizona, Australia, Germany, Maine, in addition to my usual 3 - The Washington Post, the Seattle P-I, and the BBC World News.

    I don't mind registering for my usual 3. I do mind registering when I want to read a single article in the Boston Piccayune. This makes me give up, and go somewhere else.

    An accepatable compromise is to make registration necessary after reading 5 or so articles, instead of for all articles at that site. After all, do their local advertisers really care about someone who is miles away?

    --
    Tepp
  2. Comment removed by account_deleted · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  3. Pushback from Google News by Animats · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Google News puts "subscription" after those links that require a login, and usually offers non-subscription alternatives. So there's some pressure from that direction to avoid registration.

    One effect may be to encourage more readership of Government-funded news sites. That's fine, as long as they're not all from the same government. Google News frequently has links to Xinhua, the BBC, the Voice of America, and Al-Jazeera. None require registration.

    It's worth reading all four of those. If all four have roughly the same take on some event, the info is probably correct. If they don't, news manipulation may be going on.

    (It's also amusing to read the Jerusalem Post, which is Israel's equivalent of Fox News.)