Saturday, January 12, 2013

Quandary: Because I'm a Cheapskate

Looks like my hometown newspaper, The Charlotte Observer, and the other major NC newspaper, The News & Observer of Raleigh, have retreated behind pay walls as of the beginning of the year. This takes a lot of blogfodder away from me, since I like to comment on area events, crime, etc. Even if I subscribe to the papers it won't help my readers, because any links I include in my blog entries would be subject to the same restrictions.

So the blogging will be necessarily lighter for a bit while I figure this out. So far the Wilmington, NC Star-Ledger hasn't gone to a pay wall, so I can still cover NC news to a certain extent.

This was inevitable, of course. Blogging will die when bloggers can't send links to each other. For those of a conspiracy mindset, it might be evidence that the MSM is attempting to kill off "the new journalism" by starving it of source material, and thus competition for readers.

How many of you out there are dealing with this?

1 comment:

Jon said...

Same thing with the main paper in Boise, The Statesman. Stupidest thing I saw was when they put the road report (after a huge snowfall) behind the paywall.