Times to Stop Charging for Parts of Its Web Site

Kudos, now disappears a most annoying aspect of The Times subscription model, their lengthy and sometimes messy partner attributes and values of every story link. Often linkmarking and social sites such as Reddit and Digg suffer from multiple postings because they cannot detect and distinguish independently submitted links, fracturing subsequent discussion into multiple comment threads, yuck! (Newsvine still suffers from this, but for different reasons.)

Though in principle i like the pay subscription model, for most people transactions costs outweigh any payment and they choose to support their habit by trading away a bit of their attention and privacy. We grow ever toward ubiquitous advertising unfortunately, but for popular journalism, data apparently cannot support a subscription business model. With an abundance of outlets for any given story, i too rarely pay to read news articles on the Web. Of subscription periodicals, just the Wall Street Journal, the Economist, and Rochester Business Journal, and academic journals too, remain on my reading lists, and all of them publish free features. For lack of a better slogan: information wants to be free.