The Paper of Record

Tim, wasn't it you who was commenting on the fact that none of Blair's sources called to complain about inaccuracies? Guess what, NYT, no one expects reporters to get the story right anyway…

Comments

[L.A. Loather]

I don't come to Reason to be drafted into the readership of the L.A.Times or any other publication. It is certainly cool for the L.A.Times to want to have some profile of "their readers." But I am not one of them! The only thing that would send me to the L.A.Times site is the incompleteness of an article in another publication, which cites the L.A.Times as core source material.

I have become very picky about the sites with which I register, because I have found, through hard experience, that I have to work too hard to keep my name off of spam lists, whenever I accede to these "simple, reasonable requests for registration information." In the post-PATRIOT era, when my own city library is shredding their records every evening, and warning me about the government's newfound power to check into my information-retrieval habits, can you blame me for being just a bit uncomfortable about releasing demographic info along with my email address? If I were a regular user of the L.A.Times site, by choice, I would have no problem with their registration requirement. But I resent being asked for personal information, just to follow a cite, without which a derivative work of commentary in another publication cannot be appreciated at all, much less fully.

Not to be too harsh, but you missed my point entirely. I'm not angry with the L.A.Times for doing what they feel they have to do with respect to their own resources and product. Reason (and any other online publication) disappoints me when it puts me in the position of having to put up with the L.A. Times? practices, simply to make sense of Reason's own material! Reason should be complete and self-contained to a reasonable degree in all of its articles, including the original blog postings of its staff. Going to the cited links should be an option that readers pursue in order to dig more deeply into the subject matter and gain additional perspective, not a requirement that must be satisfied in order to comprehend what the subject is in the first place.

[Ditto]

Is there any way you guys at Reason can either link to pages that don't require fees or registration just to be able to read the darn thing? Can't you at least excerpt enough of the article so that we can get the idea, without having to go through blasted form-filling exercises?

Your piece does not really explain what the item is. Any attempt to find out (by following your link) only leads to the hated L.A.Times registration screen with their shit-haired demographic profiling.

Look, if it were necessary to buy a newspaper for articles in the L.A.Times in order to get context for articles in Reason, I would never buy Reason in the first place. And at one time, I was a subscriber (since 1971.)

[Sara]

Generally I try to circumvent reg-only sites but I didn't find an alternative for this one.

The piece is pretty much what I put in the blog post...it interviews Blair's subjects who saw inaccuracies and didn't follow up.

[Warren]

ECHO crappy link. No way I'm going to jump through those nooses.

[Anonymous]

Man, three screens worth of these guys harping on free content because of a third-party, private party, free enterprise data mining tool?

Did you want cookies and milk to to come before naptime this afternoon too?

[Sean]

ID: password990

password: password

This should work for both LA and NY Times. Honestly, it's not hard, illegal or immoral to set up a dummy account to use. It's easy, use the one above or try your own.

[geophile]

I'm growing weary of the anti-registration crowd too. What, have they been on the internet for all of five minutes? Everything goes by registration, that's part of how they keep it free. Consider it a consumption-based tax. By even having internet service, you're compromising your precious anonymity. Are you guys dialing in from the Freemen compound, or what?

[RR Ryan]

Log onto the LA Times and have a chuckle, too. ID: laexaminer, password: laexaminer.

[tim]

I was not the person who pointed out the lack of Blair-source complaints, though I applaud whoever did notice this non-phenomenon. And while I encourage all linkers to find non-registration sources, I wholly endorse linking to registration-required content when none other is available. (I'm also bullish on sitting through the required 15 seconds or so to read Salon content.) Readers are free to complete the registration and read the story, or to forego the opportunity, as they choose. But life's too short to listen to trivial complaints.