Montreal City Weblog

Kate 08:53 on 2020-05-16 Permalink Reply  

• EmilyG 13:20 on 2020-05-16 Permalink

  It has a paywall.

• Kate 13:29 on 2020-05-16 Permalink

  Sorry. I managed to see it without an account, maybe because it was linked from somebody’s facebook?

• DeWolf 14:25 on 2020-05-16 Permalink

  I managed to avoid the paywall by opening the article in a private/incognito window.

• Kevin 18:03 on 2020-05-16 Permalink

  Pay for your news.

• Chris 18:12 on 2020-05-16 Permalink

  >Pay for your news.

  Paying doesn’t remove the ads and doesn’t stop the analytics, so, meh.

• DeWolf 18:16 on 2020-05-16 Permalink

  I’m not going to subscribe to the Globe and Mail for the very occasional article I want to read from them when I already pay for Le Devoir, the New York Times, the Guardian and the New Yorker, to name just a few. There’s only so many publications someone can afford to subscribe to.

• Blork 20:53 on 2020-05-16 Permalink

  I agree with DeWolf. Yes, it’s good to support good journalism, but you can’t subscribe to everything, especially since a lot of them want $100 a year or more, which is steep if you’re subscribing to 15 or 20 and you only read two or three article a month.

  Most news and magazine sites offer a few free articles a month and that’s great (and typically very easy to work around if you hit that one extra article you want to read).

• Kate 10:27 on 2020-05-17 Permalink

  Kevin, how would I pay for sites like CTV’s? I assume I’m subsidizing CBC/Radio-Canada through taxes, which is fine. I kick in $10 monthly for La Presse because they made that possible, but as Blork says, most news outlets want a bigger financial commitment.

  If I were wealthy I’d subscribe to more things but, while I’m OK now, like many people the outlook for my working life is pretty uncertain so I’m hesitant to sign up for more payments.

  Further thoughts: I have an ad blocker on the browser I use for personal stuff. I don’t use an ad blocker on Safari, the one I mostly use for the blog, because I need to see the web as it is with no filters. Likewise, as a blogger, I wouldn’t want to be logged into sites as a paying customer, because I don’t want to link to things (as I did here, by mistake) that not all my readers can look at.

• Kevin 16:09 on 2020-05-17 Permalink

  I have limits to my budget too, but saying “there’s a paywall” as if it’s insurmountable barrier is silly. People gotta get paid for their work, be they restaurant workers or journalists.

  And Chris: Ads have been paying part of the price for news for 300 years.

• JaneyB 00:19 on 2020-05-18 Permalink

  Friendly reminder that the BanQ has online access to newspapers and magazines including the Globe. All free but you need to join/renew. The process of accessing articles this way is not very spontaneous but…it is possible. (‘Free’ as in paid for via taxes).

  I also accessed the article easily with a private window.

• Kate 08:28 on 2020-05-18 Permalink

  JaneyB, thanks. I’ve checked out the library offerings, but they didn’t seem to have the current issue in many cases. The issue that non‑members can’t access the issues is pretty serious, even given that it’s free to join. And nobody can join right now with it closed, since you do have to show up in person at least once with proof of residency.

• Chris 13:53 on 2020-05-18 Permalink

  >And Chris: Ads have been paying part of the price for news for 300 years.

  Yes, but for 95% of that time ads were merely annoying, now they are spyware. Same name, different beast.

  There are also various clever browser plugins to bypass media paywalls, ex:
  https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome

  which despite the URL works on Firefox too.