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?