Friday, April 09, 2010

Internet newspaper content to be no longer free?


A note to my readers - after watching Media Watch on ABCTV the other night I think we should expect that the many journalistic articles from newspapers from all over the world that provide and have provided much of the fodder for my list-making activities will become less available in the future, as the great newspapers of the world have found that they can't finance their expensive operations from selling advertising in free online content. They are apparently going to start charging us to read their stuff. I guess this is fair enough, but also a much less convenient situation for people like me. The bit that I really object to is the possibility that some papers will keep their stories completely hidden behind a fee-wall. Apparently we will not be able to view anything of their stories without paying, not even a summary or abstract or title or first few lives. I guess this means their content will be invisible to search engines like Google and will be pretty much invisible to people like me, and will be isolated form the internet and the blogosphere in general. This would be such a stoooopid thing to do. It would diminish our culture in general and it would harm the popularity of any newspapers that take this approach.

So, if you have read someting online that is a story from a newspaper that you read for free, and you would really like to be able to read it in the future without paying, I guess now is the time to make a hardcopy.

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