Krugman jumps the fence
The most popular columnist at the New York Times teaches readers how to escape the newspaper's paid subscription plan.
247 – After a year of promises, the American newspaper The New York Times announced last Thursday that it would charge for its online content. However, it did so in the worst possible way: through expensive and contradictory plans, which generated a great deal of outrage among the newspaper's loyal readers. In response, the newspaper's most popular columnist, Paul Krugman, published a text on his blog explaining how to circumvent the services.
In the editorial published by the newspaper last Thursday, explaining the new subscription plans to readers, it was already stated that content shared via links from social networks like Twitter or Facebook would be freely accessible. The columnist, therefore, without any guilt, invites readers to visit his blog and those of other columnists to access texts through links shared by them. In this way, the publications would not be counted towards the list of 20 free articles allowed per month.
There are four types of services. For access to online content plus a smartphone app, the monthly fee will be US$15. For access to online content plus a tablet app, the user will pay US$20. For all three options, US$35. And finally, for all three options plus the print newspapers, US$46,80.
On the profile of columnist on TwitterHe publishes a huge list of articles from the newspaper, providing links to access them through the website. And in a Friday post on his blog, he explains it better: “We encourage access through links from Twitter, Facebook, blogs and social networks. When you access NYT.com through one of these channels, the articles will count towards your monthly limit. However, when the limit is reached, you will continue to have access. When the newspaper's website is accessed through links in search engines, you will have a daily limit of five articles.”
The plan is to create loopholes in such a selective subscription plan, so that loyal readers are not completely excluded, having alternatives to access some content freely, beyond the limit already offered by the newspaper. In response to Krugman's publication, readers maintain a great revolt against the paywall, stating total resistance to the price charged for the services. But in the end, they liked the suggestion. Especially the Canadians, who were the first to try the subscription plan, even before the Americans, last Thursday, the 17th.