homegurl rants

6.22.01 continued...

the end of free

the albuquerque journal recently started something really irritating that essentially closes down all their content to the casual reader. they will not let you even read an abstract of the article without a subscription. talk about closing the borders to a city and putting up a wall!

here is the journal's statement....

"ABQjournal.com has adopted guidelines and conditions of use that serve as the basis for our customer relationships. These guidelines have been developed with the recognition that Internet technologies are constantly changing. Accordingly, guidelines are subject to change. Any such changes will be posted on our guidelines page, which you are invited to read before registration. "

so, they are charging by the month ($8) or year ($60). salon is only $30! the wall street journal is $4.95 a month, and if i subscribe, do i still have to suffer their advertising? (hint-with the wsj the ads are in place) and where does the albuquerque journal get off charging the same amount as the wall street journal? are their writers that good? is their research that thorough?

they leave themselves an out, though, by stating guidelines are subject to change. which means, hey, we can charge more, we can charge less, or we can burn the people who coughed up the $60 and revert to free content at a later date.

if no one but subscribers sees the ads and articles, how will this affect the companies buying the ad space? cutting down the amount of click-throughs and eyeballs is bad business when precious few people click-through ads anyway. 

pop-ups ok?

maybe that is the point. since no one clicks on the ads, where is the revenue going to come from? but then, why does there need to be revenue (aside from archives) from the current days news? 

isn't the only reason we have newspapers anyway is to read the advertising that were bought from the newspapers in the first place? the days of nailing current information on a tree are long gone. or is it? is the internet our "newspaper tree"? 

some online newspapers have a pay as you go payment system. "to read the entire article, pay $0.40 now..." the santa fe new mexican offers to e-mail the article for various fees, about $0.20 and up depending on how many you send the article to. you can even pay rate to place their article on your website. their highest fee ($7.00/article) lets you place the content on your site, but you can format it to your own specs. 

i think the best system is to give the current day's news for free, allow people to e-mail that day, then charge for the archived data. i like the new mexican's way of payment also, but i could still wholesale copy an article and e-mail to whomever i want. (my bad, here). i will say that i would pay the $7 per article if it was something i truly needed on my site.

hopefully, the new york times will continue  their current plan. but then you never know. the recent supreme court ruling about electronic reprints of freelance writers may be at the root of all this new lack of so-called free information. 

i say so-called because there is still the advertising to deal with on these sites.

npr recently covered this issue on all things considered, june 25, 2001. the ruling only covers freelance written articles as covered by the national writers union vs. nytimes, et al. it does not cover articles written by a newspaper's salaried writers.

maybe the pop-under ads are starting to look pretty good now, then you can at least read the online content from newspapers around the country. 

this rant just covers the newspapers, online television sites are out there too. interestingly, they recently seem to be covering local issues better than the traditional newspapers.

it was via a dallas television station website not the dallas morning news where i found they, too had problems with dynamic cable. it was all the affiliate sites for fox (kfox-las cruces) that i found the information about lead in children's jewelry, not the el paso times or other newspaper site.

so in the end, all you can do is sit back, relax and keep on searching with google! but you can only search for what you want to find out more about, not for something you have not heard of yet.

for now, here are some additional newspaper sites in the region currently offering their content for free on the day it is printed. fees for archived articles may apply. in addition, just about every local tv station provides its content online as well.

regarding the recent supreme court ruling see:
www.npr.org  6.25.01 story

national writers union

6.16.01 :: disgusted with myself, for not attending the 2nd evil empire's media extravaganza held at TacoTech to promote TIME's La Frontera issue, i was cheered to read Bobby Byrd's no holds barred guest column on Stanton Street. 

5.09.01 :: the spouse speaks his mind about the lack of support by the city for local  firms

6.17.01 ::  Anti-Corporate Student Forced To Apologize To McDonald's 

here it is, an interview with Tristan Kading, the boy who told McDonald's in a school assembly just what he thought of them. 

related link:
http://www.mcspotlight.org