July 24, 2013

Why I pay to get through the paywall at the NYT but not the Washington Post.

I'm looking for material to link to from this blog, and if I link to the NYT, my readers can click through to the article without hitting the paywall. That doesn't happen at the Washington Post, so I don't want to spend time reading there. Before WaPo put up the paywall, I had not subscribed to the NYT. I had migrated over to the Washington Post to find material that wasn't obstructed. But when the Post put up the paywall that blocks readers arriving at specific pages through links, it sent me back to the NYT, where I subscribed.

It's one thing to have a paywall, quite another to have a link-deflecting paywall.