I do agree that they should develop a model that is painless for its userbase. I am a big fan but if they start locking content like FT or WSJ and go beyond my dollar threshold I’ll go elsewhere even though there’s very few reliable national news sites in the U.S.

Why can’t Murdoch and friends take their fight elsewhere?

What the readers have paid for is a portion of the cost of putting ink on paper.

Advertisers pay for content.

The problem in newspapers is two fold:
* The bean counters have been systematically cutting the quality of the product to make quarterly numbers.
* Their most profitable section, classifieds, is having its lunch eaten by Craigs List, etc.

The main reason newspapers haven’t been able to make money on their Web sites is that they are run by idiots. I remember reading 3-4 years ago that the NYT’s Web site was bragging that they had reached break-even. But that was only if one assumed that all the content they received was free! If they had given me the contents of the NYT, I would have been profitable within a week.

I just use rotating throw away email addresses, but deleting a specific cookie would be more convenient.

I think the newspaper sites should be allowed an antitrust exemption to form consortiums. Say you combined the NYTimes, the WashPost, papers from Europe, Asia, etc., and then charged $150/year and divided the proceeds based on page views.

I think that, to be technically robust, discrimination between links has to as simple as possible and on the server side. So, e.g., front-page, day-of-publication articles are free (which makes sense because they are the most attractive to advertisers), but everything else is micro-metered.

The FT system worked on me. I eventually succumbed, even though I get the print version as well. (website access is extra, which is a bummer)

However, the performance of ft.com is pathetic. It can take 20 seconds for the home page to load. Not a patch on NYT or WSJ.