This one's a bit on the hilarious side, just giving you fair warning.
If you thought Rupert Murdoch was ridiculous with his quest to erect paywalls around his online news empire, you're in for a surprise. The Sun Chronicle, a small-time newspaper in Massachusetts, is instituting a paywall this week that's even more pretentious than the likes of which we've yet seen.
They're making people pay to comment on news stories posted to their website.
Apparently the news staff had become so sick of riling commenters that it killed its comments system completely back in April. After months of mulling over his options, publisher Oreste P. D'Arconte has decided that the best way to enforce rules in comments is to rid them of anonymity. The best way to be sure that users are using their real names? Charge them a one-time payment of $0.99 and make them use a valid credit card, of course!
Now readers in the Attleboro, MA area will need to pay the paper to voice their opinions, and the name on their credit cards will be automatically used for their comment signatures. On top of that, their addresses will be used to state the neighborhoods in which they live, just to be sure that there's no ambiguity (oh, that Fred T. Johnson). The paper goes on to state that anybody getting a little too uppity will be permanently banned from the site.
I understand having mixed feelings for Web commenters, but really... ?
[via The Guardian]
A small-time Massachusetts paper is instituting a paywall -- for commenters originally appeared on Download Squad on Wed, 14 Jul 2010 12:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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