Yesterday, I whined that a newspaper was not letting me read their content. Yes, I get it that we need to pay writers and editors so that they can provide us with content. The problem is that twitter, facebook, and even email provides me with many possible articles to read on any given day. I don't want to pay for subscriptions to five or ten news outlets. I do pay for my local paper, and I do pay for the New York Times. But to follow everything I want to read, I would also have to pay for the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, the Globe and Mail, the Boston Globe (thanks, speechboy), and on and on.
Folks suggested that I just go through the Carleton library website, but the joy of twitter and the other outlets is that I hit a link and I am there, rather than digging through the entire paper from Carleton's website. This is kind of the same problem but different when it comes to video content. I whine that I cannot hit a Daily Show link because Canada protects Comedy Network (the CA network) from Comedy Central. So, yes, I can go search through an episode of the Daily Show via the CN network, but I cannot go directly to the specific skit/segment/whatever via link.
The problem is that the internet has made me aware of all of the good stuff out there, and it taunts me. I could just read less, and that is actually what happens when I stumble into a gate. I spend too much time online as it is, so I don't expend extra effort to get stuff unless I need it for my research. I don't expend extra effort just to get something for my blog.
This does breed a bad habit of retweeting and commenting stuff based on headlines rather than the text. Which does bring us back to an old theme here: things I have read but not read myself.
I would be willing to subscribe to an aggregator that paid the various news outlets as I don't want the news business to die off, but I also don't want to pay for the 97% of each of these news outlets that I will never read. The 21st century is a complex place. Oh well, consider this the whine du jour.
I'm glad I'm not the only one. When researching why my garbage prices spiked in my local community, I had to revert to blogs rather than our newspaper. As a millennial, I really, really don't want to pay for any subscriptions since the majority of the content I consume is free. That being said, I will pay - as long as the content is visual or auditory in nature too. I'm not dishing out cash for just text.
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