Locked with a Subscribers Key

In recent years, we've seen a major shift from reading our news in newspapers to getting our news online. Advances in technology now deliver our favourite newspaper on our laptops, our iPhones, our iPads and PCs- without the ink stained fingerprints. The latest news developments are literally at our fingertips. We have the opportunity to read several news sources on one issue and we're able to share stories that are important or relevant to our day-to-day lives on our social networks. But there are some people who don't altogether love this development: the newspapers and their journalists.

Sales on newspapers have slugged as we reach to our favourite news website for our news updates, resulting in a huge decrease in newspaper sale profits and journalists find their work posted for all to read for free. Personally, I love that we are able to read through multiple websites and read as much on an issue as possible.

My favourite online news source is the Wall Street Journal. For the past few weeks I've been on it multiple times a day reading about Japan and Libya to keep up with the latest as reported. But in the past few weeks I've noticed that more and more of their articles are locked with the subscriber’s key, in an effort for readers to subscribe to the online resources for a fee.

I sit on the bench here...

I'm cool with paying for the quality of information available on wsj.com; after all, I'm getting better content online than available in a newspaper. I know journalists travel extensively to bring stories to us, I understand that in an evolving world, newspapers are finding their new place and this all comes at a price to continue to deliver information....but I also think: shouldn't information like the level of radiation in Japan at the moment be made public for all the read? Shouldn't we all know about what's happening in Libya? 

With the Internet has come a deluge of information and we are exposed to and can follow stories like never before; shouldn't this information continue to be freely accessible for us all?....especially for those in Libya and Japan. It's important we have an idea of what's going on. In my mind, nothing is worse than a barrier to knowledge of what's going on in our global society.