Now that The Seattle Times has a hard firewall that they’re going to try to keep people out of, I’m going to oblige, and send fewer people there as well as reading it less. So while there are some stories that are important and that I’m glad they’re covering, I’ve been much less inclined to link to them recently than I have been before. Why waste people’s limited number of click throughs on an AP story or something ephemeral and silly?
You can put your mouse over the text before it comes up, so if you care you can see, but most people don’t think that hard. I’ve become somewhat annoyed by people on Twitter who still use link shorteners. Just paste the link so we can see before clicking through.
What I’m more concerned about is that it means that there are fewer places to get local news, and a lot of people will simply stop bothering. I hope blogs and other newspapers — and TV, etc. — websites can fill the hole The Seattle Times are leaving online. Maybe with Twitter and Facebook people are getting their news from a wider variety of sources now anyway. But it has to originate somewhere. You probably can tell from the open threads what I use as sources for the news, but are there any places you’ve been reading more or plan on reading more for local news?
While I was on vacation for a couple of days last week, my boss encountered the firewall warning, and promptly ordered his assistant to renew subscription (which I had canceled quite some time ago).
It’s not the cost which bothers me, it’s rather nominal. It’s just that the content isn’t worth walking down a flight of stairs and back up just to retrieve the dead-tree edition of the paper.
The web-only edition of the Seattle P.I. is an alternative, but lately it’s emphasis on entertaining slideshows and videos causes my computer to freeze up at inconvenient times. I wish they had a text-only index, as the Seattle Times does.
2: If you use Firefox, NoScript is your friend.
# 3: Yep, but my computer at work is controlled by our IT dept. in L.A., which insists that having more than one version of one operating system anywhere in the company is a “security risk”. In other words, they don’t want to have to update more than one version at a time – preferably three or more years after it is released, at which point it has already been rendered obsolescent.
http://slog.thestranger.com/blogs/slog/ !
I like rss feeds. For instance there is the PI feed index which lets you select among others their Local News feed which in turn leads you to such gems as this:
Alaska congressman recalls the days of ‘wetbacks’
The great thing is the feeds themselves are light weight and do not put a load on your browser.
The business side of newspapers is changing, and in principle I’m sympathetic to publishers’ efforts to find new revenue. After all, newsrooms aren’t free. But after what Seattle Times did to push the P-I out of business, I have zero sympathy for ST and they can go to hell, a sentiment further reinforced by their blatant politicking on behalf of GOP candidates under the deceptive guise of “objective” journalism. We won’t get hefty local coverage from ST anyway; that’s already gone. The only question is saving what little is left of ST. If they want to charge for online content, that’s their prerogative, but I won’t go out of my way to become a paying customer in order to help ST survive. I’m indifferent to their survival, and if they disappear, I won’t miss them.
I got a kick out of seeing Mudhoney on the cover of todays Seattle Fishwrapper. Talk about things you’d never dream of seeing…
http://seattletimes.com/html/m.....w1xml.html
Seems like a big “So what?” The ST continues to deposit their dead-trees edition on our front porch every morning despite our pleading, cursing them out and doing everything but threatening to turn a pack of attack dogs loose on their carrier to persuade them to stop. Is anyone paying full freight for our fair city’s remaining daily fishwrapper?