try a newspaper that has an API, not a paywall... (Score 5, Informative)

I'm a developer for The Guardian ( http://www.guardian.co.uk/ ) - a UK newspaper not owned by Murdoch, which doesn't have any intention of becoming invisible any time soon - rather than erecting a paywall, we've spent the last year putting together a content API that allows anyone to explore our content using search terms, faceting, etc - and then build your own application upon it. Check it out here:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/open-platform/getting-started

The implementation, written in Scala and based on Apache Solr/Lucene stack was pretty good fun (we plan to opensource it within a few months) - slides with some of the implementation details are here :

http://www.slideshare.net/openplatform/the-guardian-open-platform-content-api-implementation

Alan Rusbridger, the editor of the Guardian, recently gave a pretty deep lecture on the 'open vs closed' & 'authority vs involvement' questions raised by the spectre of paywalls:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/jan/25/cudlipp-lecture-alan-rusbridger

cheers,
Roberto

(views my own, not necessarily those of my employer, yack yack yack)