There Are Times To Take Down The Registration Wall

from the common-sense dept

Given massive breaking news, such as the London bombing, you would think that the last thing a news organization would be worried about is getting the latest dirty data on their readers. Instead, though, some online news organizations left the registration wall in place, leading many to just go elsewhere for their breaking news. Obviously, the news organizations that believe in registration are likely to believe in it even more during times of breaking news — but it actually should serve to underscore the limitations of registration, in that it just drives people elsewhere for news that isn’t particularly unique. Of course, the reality of the situation is probably that many of these news organizations never thought that they’d want to be able to take down the registration wall for breaking news, and so they don’t even have the capabilities.


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Comments on “There Are Times To Take Down The Registration Wall”

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2 Comments
Anonymous Coward says:

No Subject Given

During the recent round of California earthquakes, an alarming (and alarmingly vague) Tsunami warning came on TV. I searched Google News to see if this was legit or not, and my first hit, a TV news site that suggested it had information about the warning, linked me to the usual registration bullshit. This wasn’t just breaking news, this was the emergency broadcast system suggesting a Tsunami might hit in 20 minutes (they actually gave a hypothetical impact time) and a network news site asking me for my age and household income before I could get more information. Outrageous.

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