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News Sites Getting to Know You
Posted by
michael
on Sat Jun 29, 2002 11:40 PM
from the suddenly-i'm-bright-and-breezy dept.
from the suddenly-i'm-bright-and-breezy dept.
The Online Journalism Review has a story about more and more news sites requiring registration. Has assorted facts and figures, including how much sites' traffic dropped when registration was required. Even though a fair percentage of people just make up the data they are asked to provide, I'd guess that as a statistical measure it's probably pretty accurate - many people would tell the truth without caring that they're being tracked.
As a general matter, Slashdot's policy on linking to registration-required websites goes something like this:
The New York Times is okay, because they've got a lot of high-quality stories and they were essentially grandfathered in;
Other registration-required sites are not okay, and we won't post stories linking to them.
Kind of a shame, because the LA Times has some good content too, and we've posted lot of links to them in the past, before they went registration-required. Oh well.
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Re:My viewpoint (Score:5, Insightful)
My view is that if you want to view their content, you should play by their rules. If you don't want to play, then look for that news article somewhere else. Too many people are still spoiled by the free for all days of the Internet...
I never did understand online registration... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:I never did understand online registration... (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, they get a lot of mostly-accurate data. I've participated in the development of more than a a few sites that had some form of registration - either for community sites or for sites where you get extra stuff if you provide a bit of personal info. The amount of legit info you get is much greater than the number of "booger@nose.net" addresses that show up.
Fact is, most people are one, or some of:
On the plus side, most sites don't seem to do much with the data they have, but that won't last.
It's unfortunate, but the vast majority of people don't realize the commercial trends they're enabling when they give in to this kind of thing. I'm facing the day when I have to start telling clients "it's a great idea to get people's addresses and then email them as much crap as you can" because it will be good business sense.
God, I hate that phrase. Probably time for me to get into landscaping.
Re:I never did understand online registration... (Score:4, Interesting)
I always thought it was just a simple way to prevent deep linking. Sure, you can link to a NYT story, but you'll stop and realize that the NYT is bringing it to you and not whiznews.com.
NYT Random Login Generator (Score:4, Troll)
Spoofed registration? (Score:5, Insightful)
Traffic dropping is a no-brainer: registration requires a bit more than click-and-drool, so that rules AOLers out, but I'd wager only a small percentage of the total drop is due to people concerned about privacy.
Which is a shame, but such is life.
Feed inaccurate data to the collectors, and have fun.
10 million? (Score:4, Insightful)
....6 million came from Slashdot articles and 2 million came from people that re-registered after blasting their stored passwords in Internet Explorer.
Why not (Score:3, Interesting)
NY times (Score:3, Insightful)
I have also noticed that over the last month or two
The problem that i see with the statement that they accept posts from NYT but not from other news sources that require reg is that the registration is seen as an issue for everyone but NYT.
So why should the New York Times receive any favouritism in this respect??
You said it yourself, anyone who knows what these statistics can be used for will use fake information. I would say that anyone who reads
It simply looks to me to be a bias towards NYT, and as far as i've seen over the last month or so, the number of NYT articles posted points to this reality...
IAN
Re:NY times (Score:4, Interesting)
I would post examples from The NYTimes, but they don't let you see previous issues of the paper online for free. However, as I recall their picks closely mirrored The Washington Post's:
The Washington Post [washingtonpost.com]
Top Story: Cyber-Attacks by Al Qaeda Feared [washingtonpost.com]
No. 2 Story: SEC Charges WorldCom With Fraud [washingtonpost.com]
No. 3 Story: U.S. Court Votes to Bar Pledge of Allegiance [washingtonpost.com]
The Los angeles Times [latimes.com]
Top Story: 'Tweens: From Dolls to Thongs [latimes.com]
One of the store mannequins wears a fringed denim skirt riding low on the hips and a top pushed high on the midriff. Another has shorts that roll down on the tummy and a one-shoulder top.
No. 2 Story: Pledge of Allegiance Violates Constitution, Court Declares [latimes.com]
No. 3 Story: WorldCom Hit With Federal Fraud Lawsuit [latimes.com]
The Los Angeles Times shows a consistent bias toward "Reader's Digest" type stories that are entertaining and give you something to gossip about but don't really tell you anything of value. I also get the sense that many LA Times reporters are really failed screenplay writers who can't let go of the need to create drama. However, they do occasionally print something worth reading.
The LA Times is owned by The Chicago Tribune [chicagotribune.com] , which puts even less original content on its Web site and is more "in-your-face" about pressuring you to subscribe.
I suspect Slashdot would link to The Wall Street Journal [wsj.com] more often if the paper made more than 1% of its content available to non-paying subscribers. (I had a paid subscription to wsj.com for about a year, but I no longer do because it's just not worth that much to me.)
I'd like to read Le Monde [lemonde.fr] , but the French refuse to publish an English version. Go figure.
All of Knight-Ridder's newspapers (The San Jose Mercury News [bayarea.com] , Miami Herald [miami.com] , Philadelphia Inquirer [philly.com] , et al) have been crippled by the "RealCities Network" which forces all of its sites to use the same content-poor, ad-rich design. The saddest story of the group is the SJMercury though, which has just fallen apart since the parent company began slashing costs and forcing the RealCities conformity on its once industry-leading site. The Miami Herald is an unofficial training school for future Washington Post reporters, but that doesn't matter if you can't find their content on the Web.
Slashdot doesn't link to the Financial Times [ft.com] often (ever?), though it's a great paper. It just doesn't turn out a lot of unique content that's of interest to most Slashdot readers.
Newspapers aside, Slashdot has linked to CNN [cnn.com] and the BBC [bbc.co.uk] in the past, though not the CBC [www.cbc.ca] . ABC, CBS and NBC generally provide watered down news for people who don't like to read newspapers -- not Slashdot readers.
Slashdot often links to MSNBC [msnbc.com] , but I expect that will begin to decline -- MSNBC.com's founding editor (Merrill Brown, a former Washington Post reporter) recently announced that he's resigning after 6 years to pursue other, undisclosed "opportunities." The New York Times noted on June 12 (you'll have to pay for the archived version of the story) that he offhandedly mentioned that MSNBC.com is about to be swallowed by MSN for economic reasons. (In other words, Microsoft put its foot down and said financial concerns outweigh editorial concerns.)
The International Herald-Tribune [iht.com] writes some of its own content, but a lot of the paper is an amalgamation of New York Times and Washington Post stories.
I haven't read the Seattle Post-Intelligencer [nwsource.com] or the Seattle Times [seattletimes.com] in a while, but you may find some good technology stories there.
Bottom Line: Slashdot links to a disproportionate number of New York Times and Washington Post stories because both papers' sites post a lot of content and that content is top notch. It also helps that they're among the most recognizable names in journalism, but the Slashdot system is set up to allow editors to pick from the best stories that are submitted, regardless of the content provider's brand recognition. If you read a good story somewhere, submit it -- the quality of the story is more important than the misguided registration policies of the content provider. And if I've missed a good site people should be reading, reply to this message and let people know.
Hottest commodity (Score:4, Interesting)
Open up your sunday paper and look at all the great bargins you can get. Cd's for $14.99 with a $5 instant rebate and a $10 mail in rebate. Do you really think they are giving you the cd's for the price of the tax only? No. They are gonna sell the information you send them to get your rebate. And that information will be 100% correct.
Passport...Ok (Score:3, Interesting)
Cool.
I can have one of my dozen or so phony-info Passport accounts manage my dozen or so phony news site logins!
Next Please...
One reason they do it, is to prevent archiving (Score:5, Informative)
Lots of robots don't even request /robots.txt, but proceed to download and index stories.
Requiring registration is more than 10 times as effective in stopping robots, as /robots.txt is.
Note that the NYTimes and other sites often allow backdoor entry with referers. For example, one of my favorite news portals is MyNewsFirst.com [mynewsfirst.com]. When you click on a NYTimes story listed there, you don't have to register, because it sends either a "passthrough referer", or an extra query string certificate (e.g. &partner=mynewsfirst), which bypasses the registration requirement.
I'm just glad most RealCities [realcities.com] newspapers aren't doing it yet, since they provide geographically diverse news.
some demographic information is reasonable to ask (Score:5, Informative)
As I wrote in my article, Web Communities and the Art of Making Money [imaginaryplanet.net] gathering basic demographic information is vital for obtaining the highest possible advertising rates. For low to medium traffic sites, having a good handle on your reader demographics makes the difference whether your ad rates are high or low. To me, there are very good reasons for demanding a demographic survey right at the very start. Sure, it pisses off a few technologically illiterate readers, but the prospect of free content should be enticement enough.
The problem is that individuals want to keep their personal information private. Many will simply lie about personal information (and really, if a newpaper site is asking for your phone number, that is way too much).
The other problem is the tedious nature of those marketing surveys that some of these registration forms require. Plan to buy a car in the next year? Do you spend over $1000 a year on computer stuff? Do you go on cruises? That sort of crap, besides being irrelevant and none of these site's business, are extremely tedious to fill out. And sometimes it's easy to overlook a radio box you were supposed to uncheck about whether you want to receive regular emails about great new offers.
The next problem is protecting your email address. Only an idiot would give a real or a regularly used email address.
The final problem is linkability. For less web-savvy people, they are unwilling to pursue a link on your weblog if it references a registration-required site. I know for example, some of my international friends would never register for the New York Times site even if the article is great.
That's a problem, but if it gives these media sites a better margin for breaking even, so be it.
Robert Nagle, Austin, Texas
an urge to slashdot (Score:4, Insightful)
A Few Modest Suggestions for Jamming the System (Score:3, Interesting)
If everyone did this, they might soon realize that such annoying requirements were counterproductive.