4 ms·

I don't know if anyone else feels this way, but making documents like these public but behind a paywall is just really discouraging and seems contrary to public

by ss48 5y ago

I don't know if anyone else feels this way, but making documents like these public but behind a paywall is just really discouraging and seems contrary to public interest. When I tried to submit feedback to the Times, and the link to submit feedback is behind a paywall too. I would even be okay if they asked to sign in to access the documents but not need to subscribe.

leephillips 5y ago
I costs a fortune to run The New York Times. I’m sure they feel that most of their stuff is in the public interest, in one way or another. If they want to charge for access as part of their business plan, that’s really up to them. I don’t see that as having a moral dimension. That being said, they maintain a paywall that seems to be deliberately trivial to get around.
ghaff 5y ago
So you don't want to subscribe. Where is the money supposed to come from?
- tshaddox 5y ago
  I would pay the hosting bill for the text files.
  - ghaff 5y ago
    You actually think that is the cost of digging up the information? If it were just a hosted text file I'm sure are tons of other places you can download it from.
- ss48 5y ago
  So, a few comments regarding this. A good amount of the money can come from most of the articles published summarizing and critiquing the records that they are publishing, and the investigations they did related to the records at question. I was really more focused on the source records themselves being available for download and viewing after all the articles about them were written. I wasn't really sure how much retrieving the documents and hosting them would cost considering that smaller organizations like Wikileaks are able to publish much larger numbers of documents as a nonprofit and governmental agencies like archive.gov do keep documents like the Pentagon Papers hosted for free access. Although, granted, the Times must have put a lot more effort in evaluating and verifying the records and coming up with ideal ways to present them before publishing them. It's not exactly that I myself don't want to subscribe, but my thought was that people who chose not to subscribe to the Times but other newspapers like Washington Post or USA Today and also journalism in general would probably benefit with non-paywalled access to the source records, even though this doesn't fully equate to a moral dimension, as a commenter below said. That's mostly what was going on in my mind when posting my comment.

by ss48 5y ago

leephillips 5y ago

I costs a fortune to run The New York Times. I’m sure they feel that most of their stuff is in the public interest, in one way or another. If they want to charge for access as part of their business plan, that’s really up to them. I don’t see that as having a moral dimension. That being said, they maintain a paywall that seems to be deliberately trivial to get around.

ghaff 5y ago

So you don't want to subscribe. Where is the money supposed to come from?

tshaddox 5y ago
I would pay the hosting bill for the text files.
- ghaff 5y ago
  You actually think that is the cost of digging up the information? If it were just a hosted text file I'm sure are tons of other places you can download it from.
ss48 5y ago
So, a few comments regarding this. A good amount of the money can come from most of the articles published summarizing and critiquing the records that they are publishing, and the investigations they did related to the records at question. I was really more focused on the source records themselves being available for download and viewing after all the articles about them were written. I wasn't really sure how much retrieving the documents and hosting them would cost considering that smaller organizations like Wikileaks are able to publish much larger numbers of documents as a nonprofit and governmental agencies like archive.gov do keep documents like the Pentagon Papers hosted for free access. Although, granted, the Times must have put a lot more effort in evaluating and verifying the records and coming up with ideal ways to present them before publishing them. It's not exactly that I myself don't want to subscribe, but my thought was that people who chose not to subscribe to the Times but other newspapers like Washington Post or USA Today and also journalism in general would probably benefit with non-paywalled access to the source records, even though this doesn't fully equate to a moral dimension, as a commenter below said. That's mostly what was going on in my mind when posting my comment.