The Toronto Star has joined the ranks of the Globe & Mail and Canwest Global. What they used to provide for free, for a short period, they now provide for pay (or under the guise of “registration”), for a shorter period. (The Canwest group actually charges for web content)
What the hell am I on about? Subscriptions to newsweb — something I’m not terribly fond of. (Hat-tip: bourque)
The Star wants you and I to register to access stories on the site. I suppose the annoying advertising they fed web viewers wasn’t profitable enough. Now they want to feed it to me by e-mail, or deny non-subscribers to their dead tree version access to the web version. Which-ever. It means that any link I make to a story is a dead end to you, my reader, unless you too are a “subscriber”. Pah. Have you ever followed a link off a weblog to the Washington Post, or New York Times? Unless the blogger has included their subscriber’s key in the link, you’re dead-ended. It’s so bad I almost never click a link I know is going to The Times. I mean, as a reader, how many goddam newspapers can I subscribe to? How many sites do I want to give my e-mail address to? I’m a media junkie, not a whore.
So to Toronto Star, I bid you adieu — one less site to link to. I have had, quite enough thank you, of print media on the web.
Their webmasters catered specifically to advertisers’ needs, which meant their layout was anything but easy to read.
As with Canwest and The Globe, you were never quite certain how long content would be archived, so any link you and I might create to a specific story would rot quickly. Link rot can quickly erode your site’s usability. We suffer a LOT of link rot in our archives.
And like the Canwest and Globe sites, the Star’s URLs are horribly long, and littered with characters that cause my lovingly hand-crafted code to become invalid.
So, although the Star has great content and compelling writers, I bid them farewell. I can get all the news I need at CNEWS and CBC, without the registration or the cruft. (And we’ve all had quite enough of registries, haven’t we?)