Salon.com Editor Looks Back At Paywalls 246
Techdirt pointed out an interesting retrospective by Scott Rosenberg, former managing editor of Salon.com, about their experiments with paywalls and how repercussions can last a lot longer than some might expect. "More important, by this point the public was, understandably, thoroughly confused about how to get to read Salon content. It took many years for our traffic to begin to grow again. Paywalls are psychological as much as navigational, and it's a lot easier to put them up than to take them down. Once web users get it in their head that your site is 'closed' to them, if you ever change your mind and want them to come back, it's extremely difficult to get that word out."
What? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What? (Score:4, Interesting)
Funny thing is that a couple of years ago, a friend sent me a link to a couple of their political comic pages, and I've been following a few of them since then, checking them once or twice a week to see if there's anything new. But it never occurred to me to try salon's news pages, because I thought they would just block me. Guess I didn't get the message that this had changed. Actually, I'm not sure I'd bother even now, because I've mostly been following links via google news, and I don't recall ever noticing a salon.com link there. Maybe I'm just not paying attention, or maybe just have a low page rank in google's database so their articles don't get listed. Or maybe salon doesn't publish articles about things that attract my attention.
There are so many interesting news sources now that's it's hard to feel sorry (or at all) for a site that intentionally drives away their readers. (OTOH, if they're being blocked by ISPs or government filters, that tends to make them interesting and worth searching for. Sorta like how if you forbid a kid to look at something, it becomes fascinating. ;-)
Re:What? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yep. Last I remember of Salon.com was sometime in 2000 or so, they had some decent stuff. Then the paywall went up ages ago, and I forgot they existed. Except for a few times throughout the decade where Google led me to an article of theirs, only to end up being blocked of by the paywall.
Half of me thinks this is just them screaming "LOOK WE DON'T HAVE A PAYWALL ANYMORE". That is, assuming they actually don't.
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He's probably right in assuming that the potential Salon readership overlaps with the Guardian's american readership.
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I think it's hilarious how many /. readers have already chimed with the Salon isn't behind a paywall? I haven't read anything on there in years, I just forgot about it when they put up the annoying paywall. I might be willing to pay to get quality content, but I'm just going to be annoyed if you post 1/3 of a story, and then cut me off and ask for money. Which is what I remember post paywall salon to be like, so I stopped going there, ever.
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Re:What? (Score:4, Insightful)
That was the biggest point in TFA -- it's easy to put a paywall up, it's hard to get readers back if you then take it down.
What? (Score:5, Funny)
There was an article? News to me. I haven't looked at an article for at least a couple of years.
Software, too. (Score:4, Informative)
The same is true with software. Years after Opera dropped the registration fee and ads and went 100% free-as-in-beer, there were still people who thought you had to pay for it or suffer through ads in your toolbar.
Shut Up !!! (Score:3, Insightful)
Shut the fuck up! Murdock is about to institute pay walls! We want him gone! Please please shut up!
Did Salon drop their paywall? (Score:5, Interesting)
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You!
I wanna take you to a pay wall,
I wanna take you to a pay wall,
I wanna take you to a pay wall, pay wall, pay wall.
I've got something to put in you,
I've got something to put in you,
I've got something to put in you,
At the pay wall, pay wall, pay wall.
Wow!
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The link for the daypass cookie was easily found for anyone who cared to look
http://www.google.com/search?q=salon+cookie756 [google.com]
Re:Did Salon drop their paywall? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Salon is streaming lesbians
Wait, what?!
I’ll check as soon as I get off work...
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Nah; don't bother; they're not naked. They're covered with this stuff that's sorta like a RL version of a paywall; they call it "clothes" or something like that.
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I wouldn't know, because after dealing with the fucking thing several times I just gave up on the goddamn site.
I too give up surfing the net while fucking.
salon.com? (Score:5, Funny)
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Probably not in their target audience. A "Salon" is a gathering of intellectuals [wikipedia.org]. Salon.com falls (well) short of that, but most sites do. The closest it comes, in style, is when Camille Paglia "holds court".On the other hand, seeing Paglia's courtiers prostrate themselves in fawning display is... an acquired taste ... at best.
It's sort of like Slate. More bookish, more liberal.
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I assume most Slashdotters over the age of 20 were online by 2000 though?
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Re:salon.com? (Score:4, Insightful)
By 2001, sure, but it had a bunch of hype in 1999 when it bought the WELL and had an IPO. I'm under 30 and remember that!
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It was possible to be online in 2000, and not remember what salon.com was.
^^This guy
Re:salon.com? (Score:5, Insightful)
Just because you know about something doesn't mean everyone else does.
I'm too young to remember Jaws, Howard Cosell, the Dick van Dyke Show, James Cagney, flappers, and ragtime, but I know what all these are. It's called "cultural literacy" [wikipedia.org], and without it, much of the world WOOSHes by you. Reading helps.
Salon hasn't been relevant in a long time, partially because of the paywall, but I still see regular allusions to it in the media.
Re:salon.com? (Score:4, Funny)
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I'm not 13 years old (much older) and haven't heard of it. I'm also not acting like a complete shit sack like you are.
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Well, actually it doesn't help me understand their perspective any better, but it sure is fun!!
Sshhh! (Score:5, Funny)
Keep it to yourself, will you? If Rupert Murdoch gets wind of this, he might change his mind about cordoning Fox News off from the rest of the Internet!
Actually, probably not.
He's correct: bootstrap to survive (Score:2)
The money's going to run out, paywalls won't save you. I make the same argument about energy risk management: unless you spend the resources now to transition, by the time you need an alternate source, you can't exploit it. Someone else will take that opportunity for you.
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The money's going to run out, paywalls won't save you.
But slashdot still has one [slashdot.org].
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Actually, if you ever read TFA, you'd see that the paywall - while it made their future success a lot more challenging - was the only thing that did save them when the money ran out. It was basically put up a paywall and live, hurting, or don't and die out due to lack of revenue (which makes future developments moot). They did what they thought they had to do to survive, and survived, giving them the chance to painfully recover once they were able to drop the paywall.
Irony (Score:2)
I didn't even know.. (Score:3, Interesting)
..that Salon had come back. When I see 'em in the status bar, I don't bother clicking because I assume the article isn't really there.
And that's kind of interesting. Their name got known. That's half the battle. Too bad they got known in a bad way.
BTW, you know who actually got me to pay? Phoronix.
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Their name got known. That's half the battle. Too bad they got known in a bad way.
So much for the old adage "there's no such thing as bad publicity", huh? :)
Good frikkin lord... (Score:4, Funny)
If I have to read another “funny” comment saying “what! salon.com dropped their paywall?”, I think I’m going to scream.
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I didn’t mention it, but I thought it, if that counts.
Makes me wonder... (Score:2)
If www.ExpertSexChange.com dropped their paywall, how long would it take for anyone to start using that?
(I’d never even heard of salon.com, but expertsexchange is something more along the lines of what a geek would understand, I think.)
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Or scroll all the way to the bottom of the page. ;)
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Actually, ya gotta use both. They check the referrer, and put the real answers after the ads/fake answers if the referrer is Google.
If you bookmark a page and visit it later, the answers are gone.
Re:Makes me wonder... (Score:4, Informative)
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/953 [mozilla.org] ;)
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Incidentally, you can sign up for experts exchange and get access to the answers without paying. You just need to sign up as an expert and post some useful answers that help other people regularly.
The paywall only applies to people who only want answers without ever giving any back. I know they make you dig a little on the site to find out how to sign up for free, but real experts generally are quite good at digging out answers so should not find this too hard.
Filtered them a while ago (Score:2)
A significant amount of their content is lifted directly from Microsoft's KB articles, technet, etc. Other answers can usually be found elsewhere on reputable sites.
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Meh. If you’re coming from Google, the answers are way down at the bottom of the page, so I usually just hit it anyhow to see if there’s anything worthwhile.
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Yeah... they re-registered as www.Experts-Exchange.com when too many people noticed.
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Yes there is, and I know. There just happens to be a way to get around the paywall, which they created because Google got pissy over them giving Googlebot different content than it gave other user agents.
How paywalls could work (Score:3, Interesting)
As much as I don't like it as a user, I believe the "paywall" approach would work if there was one dominant way to pay for a "pass" (or a micropayment account) that would unlock millions of sites.
I have no interest in paying for a Salon (or a Slashdot) subscription, but I could see myself paying $7/month to "Google Paywall" if it unlocked millions of sites for me.
Of course, it is IMPOSSIBLE for anyone to compete with the psychology of "free", and I would hate the privacy implications of having to identify myself to every site I visit, even if it were trivially cheap...
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I believe the "paywall" approach would work if there was one dominant way to pay for a "pass" (or a micropayment account) that would unlock millions of sites.
It sounds like paying for cable TV to unlock dozens of channels that you don't care about and two that you do. Yet in Slashdot articles about cable companies, so many users post comments complaining that they can't subscribe to channels a la carte.
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I believe the "paywall" approach would work if there was one dominant way to pay for a "pass" (or a micropayment account) that would unlock millions of sites.
As with most technologies, the porn industry got this down to a science years ago.
They opened up? (Score:3, Interesting)
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Paywalls will fail unless everyone does it (Score:3, Insightful)
paywalls without a sane business model? (Score:5, Insightful)
What I don't understand is paywalls that seem to have been erected without any sane business model in mind. For instance, here [sciencedirect.com] is a physics paper that I needed to look up today. It describes a particle-physics experiment from 1979 that, as a side benefit, ended up producing one of the classic high-precision tests of special relativity. I teach at a community college, so we don't have scientific journals at the library. My wife teaches at a university, so she has electronic access to journals, but the access to this particular publisher's journal only goes back to 1995. So I find the article online, behind a paywall, and I'm all set to pay $10 for a copy, just to avoid the hassle of going to a university library and photocopying it. I click through on the link to buy a copy, and they want $31.50. That's just crazy. Since the price was insane, it motivated me to get in the car, drive 20 minutes to a university library, and find the article down in the basement stacks where they put old journals.
To me, this seems like totally irrational behavior on the part of the publisher. For any product you want to sell, there has to be a price that optimizes your profit. Price it too high, and you don't get enough volume. Price it too low, and you get volume, but not enough of a profit margin. I simply can't believe that $31.50 is the sane, profit-optimizing price for a single academic paper from 1979 -- especially not when it's electronic, so the marginal cost of distribution per copy is essentially zero. My guess is that some of these traditional print publishers simply have their heads in the sand. They believe that the advent of digital music has decimated the music business, so the lesson they take home is that anything digital is like dog poop -- don't touch it, or something bad will happen to you and your business.
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For some journals it is even cheaper to order the whole issue than to 'buy' one single paper electronically...
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I'm not sure that it's in the best interest of the scientific community to lower rates on obsolete papers, and increase them on higher quality, cutting edge papers.
Re:paywalls without a sane business model? (Score:4, Interesting)
You think you've got troubles... try finding service manuals for A/V equipment. I'm not doing this professionally; I'm just trying to keep useful gear out of the landfill (and in my living room :)
90% of the links are robot-generated spam pages. 10% of the links are pirated versions of the service manuals... behind paywalls, and the prices vary from $10 to $50 for the pirated copies. Most manufacturers are beginning to make the content available, but their prices aren't much better (yes, the legit prices are usually around $30ish) than those of the pirates.
And then you've got middlemen like scribd -- which is sometimes where the service-manual hosting sites store "their" content. Great, here's a 100-page manual that explains everything I need to know to revive this dumpster-dived flat-screen! But it's not in PDF, it's in Flash. And the "print" button works just fine, but if your print spooler isn't done in 60 seconds, that's all you get. (Seriously -- a 100-page manual, 15 pages of which would print-to-PDF on a slow machine, and 80 of which would print-to-PDF on a faster machine. The only common ground was that there was a 60-second timeout [blogspot.com] in the Flash, which was so rifuckulous that I didn't believe it until I googled it and found that link. Scribd isn't even in the business of charging for content -- all their content is user-uploaded. The YouTube analogy would be that you can watch any video you want, as long as you consume fewer than 10 CPU-seconds of system time to render it. WTF?)
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Here's a freaky one.
My boss buys a reference book, 200+ USD at Amazon. We both work at a research arm of a Uni. and I would like to learn some of the background information. I am a newbie to the field so I take it home. The next day a cow-orker wants it. Ooops! So I go home that night and log in to the Uni. library to see if I can at least find it via inter-library loan. Since I am taking classes I have a student ID so no problem on that front.
It seems the local Uni. library has a copy but it is checked out
Re:paywalls without a sane business model? (Score:5, Insightful)
I teach at a community college, so we don't have scientific journals at the library. My wife teaches at a university, so she has electronic access to journals
You miss the point. You're not the costumer. The universities are. By charging an outrageous per-article price, the publishers muscle universities into subscribing to entire catalogs.
Of course, in our trying times, university libraries are dropping journal subscriptions left and right. Once this happens enough, the most prominent researches stop publishing with those journals because they know nobody will read their work if they do.
It will be very interesting to see where the equilibrium settles with this.
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To me, this seems like totally irrational behavior on the part of the publisher.
Information is a commodity. Make it available to everyone and the information is very useful, but now has no value.
Make it available at a high price to people that have an incentive to keep it to themselves and you have something much less useful, but far more valuable.
This can work with some academic content (there are only so many places you can publish research for peer review, and they're all in on the game), but cannot work with news where a large amount of people are interested in reading, writi
Re:paywalls without a sane business model? (Score:4, Interesting)
a single academic paper from 1979 -- especially not when it's electronic, so the marginal cost of distribution per copy is essentially zero.
This probably isn't true in this case: unless they're popular, single academic papers from 1979 are likely to have few readers, and you might be the only person to pay the cost of translating said paper over to an electronic format. That wouldn't cost $32 to do, of course, but it's not as close to zero as the cost of a popular song or software package. I think your suggested $10 would be much more reasonable. The real reason for charging is to get university libraries to pay for the entire archive, but surely evne a $5 or $10 price point for older articles would be enough of a nuisance to convince libraries to buy archive access.
A suggestion if it hasn't occurred to you (if you'll pardon my gall in offering advice to a complete stranger): you might be able to get electronic copies of papers through ILL via your community college library. If not, you might try to get an affiliation with that university down the road: that may give you online access to those journals through their library. If that university isn't game, perhaps an alma mater would be willing to extend affilation to you. I did this while unemployed and while teaching at a community college, and it was very useful.
Try me (Score:5, Funny)
let the paywalls go up.
i'll be the one to write a firefox extension that double underlines all paywall sites. And we all know by now... you don't dare even mouseover double underlined text.
It's not the problem with paying for news (Score:2)
It's the problem paying for each news source separately. What people definitely not want to do is get all their news from one site, like they did in the days of newspapers. And $5/month subscriptions to 20 different sites are not going to be cost effective. Come up with a system where one pays a flat fee, has access to practically everything, worldwide, and the money is distributed in proportion to time spent on each site and people will not be averse to paying. In fact most ISPs would probably bundle the a
fast forward 10 years (Score:5, Insightful)
Fast forward 10 years to the present. I would gladly pay 30 dollars a month if all the stuff I read online was written by a professional with classical training in english or journalism. This web2.0 junk means we're all crappy authors who, as I am right now doing, stream their consciousness into textarea boxes, never a second glance at the same sentence for proofediting; rushing to the submit button to beat my peers in the subtle effect that I will feel smarter than everyone who posted thereafter.
My favorite weekly read, Ask the Pilot,is on Salon (Score:3, Interesting)
My favorite weekly column, Ask the Pilot [salon.com] by Patrick Smith, is on Salon. I think a lot of us geeks would enjoy his anecdotes and perspective. I look forward to it each week, but I wouldn't have gone past a paywall for it.
Paywalls have holes (Score:3, Informative)
Many, many paywalls have huge holes in them. I read Salon.com for years without paying -- I just told them I was Googlebot. Works for tons of sites.
And what about Register Walls? (Score:4, Insightful)
Paywalls are bad, so are Register Walls.
What is a Register Wall? The kind of nonesense you get if you go to the New York Times website.
I have no idea if they still require me to login to view their content, but they used to.
The fact that I have no idea if they still require me to login shows just how entrenced the damage to your reputation is..
I simply won't visit the New York Times website because I don't want YET ANOTHER PASSWORD to remember. Any site that wants me to register just to view content, I don't join.
Apart from Amazon, any site that wants to create an account just to purchase, I pass. I recently tried to purchase "Getting Real" but Lulu.com wanted me to register to make a purchase.
Why can't I just provide my name, address, credit card info, etc, then purchase? Why do I need to waste time creating an account, then have that information stored by them forever?
They did not get the sale. Their loss. I can read Getting Real online for free.
Re:viewers weren't stupid, they were pissed off (Score:5, Informative)
You cherry-picked the summary in your little tirade. They put up the 30 second ad "day pass" thing as a way to bring in new eyeballs, but it was so convoluted and poorly executed that users just quit coming to the site. He didn't blame the users, he blamed the paywall.
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Sorry, the GP is correct. Salon's decision to go behind a paywall pissed me off to the point where I wouldn't even bother thinking about going. The generally poor quality of the articles and editing didn't help, either. They're sort of a amateur-hour Wired.
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You. aren't. reading. accurately. Your .sig ("Please read and at least attempt to understand comment before replying, kthxbye.") is extremely ironic here.
Nice putting words in his mouth... (Score:3, Informative)
He never said the users were stupid, or even implied it. What he said was once they left, there was no way to let them know it was free again.
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Yeah, god forbid I say I don't want to read a website that runs stories I'm not interested in.
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I posted it because I deemed it to be somewhat ontopic. The article has Scott Rosenberg talking about how readership has been slow to rise since the removal of salon.com's paywall. My comment was meant to suggest that there are other possible reasons for poor readership statistics.
There is of course a difference between opinions, and offtopic opinions.
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I believe the argument being made is that, maybe, it isn't the shadow of a paywall that keeps people out of Salon.com but instead of limited appeal of its content.
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Yeah, god forbid I say I don't want to read a website that runs stories I'm not interested in.
That's an absurd criterion. I don't want to read a website that runs stories I'm not interested in to the exclusion of anything else, but I don't expect 100 percent of a website to be of potential interest.
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Nowhere did I indicate that the presense of that single article was the reason I had no interest in the website. Rather it was the complete absense of any link on their homepage that I felt compelled to click on.
That particular article I felt was a rather good example of a worthless article.
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Nowhere did I indicate that the presense of that single article was the reason I had no interest in the website.
Actually, that is exactly what you indicated in your post.
Rather it was the complete absense of any link on their homepage that I felt compelled to click on.
But you never said that in your post. If that is what you meant, why didn't you say that in the first place?
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Some of the health care proposals tax elective cosmetic surgery. Since women elect to have cosmetic surgery more often than men, it's could be argued that the burden of paying for national health care will fall disproportionally on women. If you don't care for Feminism, don't read broadsheet. If you don't care for serious feminism, stick to Jezebel.
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I like to think of FOX and Salon like Wikipedia: Occasionally they point you to something interesting but you'd better verify what they say elsewhere.
Re:I got tired of them when they went too far to . (Score:4, Insightful)
People keep saying that, but can you point even a single article on wikipedia which is outrageously incorrect and has been this way for more than a month that it might take to notice vandalism. Fox news on the other hand...
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Take a look at the more politically focused pages.
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So, can you link to a politically focused article which is factually wrong in the key facts presented?
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The Second Amendment page.
It was kept intentionally wrong for a long period of time (specifically with respect to the capitalization of 'people') It may seem silly, but it was an important point of debate for anyone interested in the topic.
For a long period of time, any changes to the capitalization were instantly reverted back and blamed on 'vandalism'
I think I actually sparked off the discussion on the fact that there was something to the topic when I linked to the text and an image of the original Const
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It was kept intentionally wrong for a long period of time (specifically with respect to the capitalization of 'people') It may seem silly, but it was an important point of debate for anyone interested in the topic.
Are you saying that this was/is the most significant inaccuracy in this rather detailed article on a contentious topic? This gives me even more confidence in using wikipedia for most of my information needs.
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If you can get past the left-right paradigm then you'd see that MSNBC and CNN are on just as bad as Fox.
As for Wikipedia I've seen a peer-reviewed scientific article deleted from an article because it gave "undue weight" to a "fringe theory."
The Franklin Scandal, according to wikipedia was a "hoax" because one state senator called it a hoax. I was banned from wikipedia for simply pointing out that the person pursuing the case was also a state senator and thus changed it to "controversy."
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The Franklin Scandal, according to wikipedia was a "hoax"
[citation needed]
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seems pretty well supported to me [wikipedia.org].
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A 1990 grand jury report concluded the allegations amounted to a "carefully crafted hoax," although the alleged perpetrators of said hoax were never officially identified. Allegations of a coverup have circulated since, including several books and a documentary film.
Wikipedia doesn't claim that the scandal was a hoax, only that grand jury reached this conclusion in it's report. Do you have a reference to the actual report which contradicts the quotation? Wikipedia entry itself references New York Times.
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If you can get past the left-right paradigm then you'd see that MSNBC and CNN are on just as bad as Fox.
Really? Please point out to me the anti-government rallies that MSNBC or CNN organized and sponsored, so that they could report on them.
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This is known as Ad hominem fallacy [wikipedia.org]. Can you show how the entry on Sarah Palin was factually wrong in the key facts presented, rather than just casting suspicion on the sources?
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Indeed. How does this square with Jimmy Wales's attestation of himself as "objectivist to the core?"
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David Horowitz used to write for Salon. Camille Paglia still does, and frequently defends Sarah Palin. The trouble with Salon's subscriber base was that it was mostly liberal, and offended at the notion of paying to be insulted.
Re:God as my witness, I didn't know they were free (Score:5, Interesting)
Part of the problem was also part of Salon's strength: they were started and run by writers. Old-school, ink-and-paper writers.
And their writing was and is very good, some of the best online. They raised the bar on the quality of online writing in the late 90's. I still regularly read some of their columnists (especially Glenn Greenwald, and their film reviews are among the best anywhere.) The intersection of the literati who would follow Salon and the tech-geeks who populate Slashdot is pretty small, so I don't expect this to resonate with many of them. They haven't fallen off the web; they've largely recovered from the hemorrhaging of readers from the paywall-period, but they won't get back the revenues they've lost in the meantime.
Re:God as my witness, I didn't know they were free (Score:4, Interesting)
And their writing was and is very good, some of the best online.
I just went to their front page and I don't see it. They look pretty tabloid to me, with not much good writing to grab me.
The intersection of the literati who would follow Salon and the tech-geeks who populate Slashdot is pretty small
I suspect many of their natural readers are just now getting their very first home computer.
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They didn't think they were the Wall St. Journal. At the time they implemented the paywall, they were very upfront about the fact that they were a small startup looking to survive, and were (somewhat desperately) exploring different ways to meet their costs. The paywall turned out to be a bad idea, but their process was an awesome model of how a business works transparently with its customers to find a survivable business model.