The Less Street Journal

March 21, 2008 in Journalism, News, problems | 3 comments

Says here the Wall Street Journal, long a fee-to-see site, is now secretly free: …in many cases, the method is drop-dead simple; in some cases, it requires the Firefox browser and add-on software. But in all cases, it’s completely legal, and in fact it’s hard to see how the Journal could object to it at all.

I subscribe to the print Journal, and will continue to do that.

I’ve generally avoided going behind the Journal’s paywall, or even visiting the journal’s website, for several reasons:

  1. I never remember my login/password. Nor does Firefox or any other browser I use. Worse, they remember the wrong thing, so I get “We Don’t Recognize Your User Name or Password”, which annoys me too much to screw with.
  2. I don’t want to get any kind of add-on software to do anything that ought to be free and routine. Especially when Firefox is slow and flaky enough to begin with. I mean, right now, on a brand new laptop, Firefox is sucking up to 48.8% of my cpu, just sitting there with no tabs open. (And yes, I am using 3.0b4. It’s better than the non-beta 3.x was, but also won’t run most of the add-ons I used to have.)
  3. Too many links take me to “The Page You Requested Is Available Only to Subscribers”, which pisses me off, since I am a fucking subscriber.
  4. The front page is, in the modern tradition of too many news sites, crowded beyond endurance.

So, Rupert, hurry up with the free version, but for real this time. Your paying subscribers will thank you.

3 comments

  1. Keith Dick’s avatar

    Keith Dick on March 22, 2008 at 11:36 am

    Something went wrong with the link at the very start of the article. At least when I click it, it leads to:

    http://joshwolf.net/blog/?p=375#more-375

    which is an account of a videographer getting arrested while recording a war protest. No mention of Wall Street Journal there.

    I copied some of the text you quoted into a Google search, and found what I assume is the page you intended the link to point to:

    http://www.mediachannel.org/wordpress/2008/03/21/the-wall-street-journals-web-site-is-already-secretly-free/

  2. Lite av varje - KATTKORGEN’s avatar

    Lite av varje - KATTKORGEN on March 22, 2008 at 3:49 pm

    […] man kan läsa Wall Street Journal gratis.  Doc Searls, chefredaktör på Linux Journal, skrev om varför han skiter i det och läser pappersupplagan i […]

  3. Doc Searls’s avatar

    Doc Searls on March 23, 2008 at 7:18 am

    Thanks for the correction, Keith. I’m not sure the link you found is the right one, but I don’t have time to check and it’ll do, so I put it there.

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