Registration: The end of online news?

[KamaAina]

One by one, we news junkies are finding our fixes hidden behind a blank screen of "Please take a few minutes to complete our registration." -- so they can package us to their advertisers!

New York Times has always had it.

Now the L.A. Times and Washington Post.

A host of other local sites have jumped on recently. Hartford. Kansas City. Charlotte. Providence. Dallas. The Orange County Register (coupled withe the L.A. Times, there goes my last chance to keep up with the SoCal grocery and transit strikes).

And the Tulsa World is subscription!!

Like SARS, the registration disease has now jumped national borders. The TYimes of London is down with it, I'm afraid, and unlikely to recover.

How, pray tell, am I going to find out what's going on in all the different cities off of this 600-square-mile rock in the middle of the sea? Bend over and re-register in dozens of different cities? :puke:

What's the point of having 500,000 sites on the Internet if they make you select ahead of time which few you're interested in?

Try using Google News these days. Half the freakin' links are useless. Little by little, they're cutting us off from too much news. It's a win-win for the system: their precious advertisers get to buy us in bulk, plus our choices of news are narrowed still further, abetting the dumbing-down of America. Priceless.

[LittleApple81]

1. Get an e-mail address dedicated only to this junk. Every once in a while

go there and clean it up.

[Nightowl]

2. There are ways around that

type in [e-mail] or any other words in that format; it usually works. Just make up name and address too.

[Flying_Pig]

3. It's also fun to put in addresses of people you don't like, ..for

instance, the Texas Republican Party.

[KamaAina]

4. All the above suggestions are fun and creative

the Texas Republican Party! Kewl!

but...

I'd STILL have to waste my time typing in the Texas Republican Party, or the Christian* Coalition, or the Carlyle Group, or whatever, AND I'd have to keep doing it over and over and over again whenever something happened in a different city, PLUS I'd have to remember whether I registered for, say, Hartford as the Carlyle Group or the Christian* Coalition.

So, I'd have beaten the advertisers, plus poked the reich-wing in the eye, BUT I still wouldn't have quick access to news. (sigh)

[dfgrbac]

5. Check the uncensored sites.

Rather than using the corporate controlled media, look at the uncensored sites. Here are some good sites:

http://www.truthout.org/

http://www.thenation.com/

http://www.mediachannel.org/

http://www.motherjones.com/

http://www.commondreams.org/

[KamaAina]

6. No argument with those sites, especially not truthout

which regularly features the work of the great William Rivers Pitt, BUT all the above sites offer opinion, and (especially Mother Jones) investigative journalism, NOT breaking news.

If, for instance, I see in LBN that a building has exploded in Charlotte, or worse, Tulsa, I'm SOL until a DUer in the area can post details.