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Passport

17 comments on Passport

Passport

: Here’s an AP story on the rash of newspaper sites requiring registration (it particarly seems rashy because Knight Ridder and Tribune have have been putting up the gate a paper at a time).

Years ago, the newspaper industry tried to start a constorium of its online news services, the New Century Network, and among the thing — the too many things — it tried to do was create a uniform registration and login for all member sites.

Oh, if only that existed: Register once and get into any news sites without having to reregister or even log in and the sites get the data they want without pissing off their readers.

It would be nice if somebody would try to restart that initiative. Hint. Hint.

17 responses to “Passport”

  1. Scott Avatar
    Scott

    Yes, uniform registration would make it much easier to get fake logins from http://bugmenot.com/ :-)

  2. Easycure Avatar
    Easycure

    Maybe somebody should just make one bogus login and password that everybody can use. Like login: newspaper, PWD: everybody.

  3. Tom Avatar
    Tom

    You forgot the link, Jeff!
    I’ve read that people are starting to think that blogs who do register for these sites (out of necessity) are ending up being pseudo primary sources for readers, especially when said bloggers make a lot of comments about a particular article.
    But, while trying to improve the vehicle we’re currently using, newspaper sites need to start realizing that their readers aren’t necessary 100% from their market – when asking questions like “how many times a week do you read paper x,” there should be an option for online reader, out of market, or something like that. It’s in their best interests, because grouping me with someone who lives in that particular market but NEVER reads the paper doesn’t give them any idea of who I am, even if I do key in my zip code.

  4. Jake Avatar
    Jake

    I think the registration thing is a very old-media response. It will continue to turn away internet readers from the papers. I don’t register at any new papers (I’m already in at NYT, WSJ, WaPO), so I never read any LA Times articles, for example.
    If the entire Knight-Ridder universe became registration-required, it wouldn’t bother me at all… I’ll never go there. The effect is to concentrate the readership at the Big 3.
    If the papers had any long-term vision, they’d promote the lack of registration and position themselves closer to the blogs.

  5. Walter Wallis Avatar
    Walter Wallis

    To newspapers that require registration I can only say, know thyself – in the biblical sense.

  6. Phelps Avatar
    Phelps

    I wish there was another “universal” login around. For a long time, we had “laexaminer:laexaminer” that would work on nearly every one. Now, the password seems to have been changed on all of them.

  7. John Anderson, RI USA Avatar
    John Anderson, RI USA

    Registration at the “free” sites is bad enough, timewasting for consumer and paper alike. Just what god does it do someplace lie Japan Daily to know I read something there once in a while?
    The ones that require a paid registration for articles over a week old are a bt less painful, because I can understand the cost of keeping such archives on-line – except suely thy have to for research by their own people in any case?
    But my real objection is that places like the Telegraph UK want me to pay the same as for delivery of the actual paper, while I only read one or two articles on occasion. A reasonable fee for foreign/occasional access would be better. An EMail to the Telegraph elicited the nonsensical response that if I subscribed to their daily paper edition, on-line access would be included.

  8. shell Avatar
    shell

    Login blogreader, password blogreader is good at a lot of them. And I know I’m not the only person who lies on those forms. (“Yes, I’m a CEO making under 20k a year who lives in 90210”)

  9. shell Avatar
    shell

    I think Jeff meant to link here.
    You know, the uniform registration thing could work like the porn industry’s AVS system. Nobody is going to subscribe to a newspaper just to read a few articles online, but I bet they would subscribe to a service that let them into a few dozen papers.

  10. ruprecht Avatar
    ruprecht

    For the front page they should have an occasional, voluntary, questionaire of the info they’re looking for.
    For internal pages they should log where the traffic is coming from, then find the most frequent referers and try to get demographic information from them. Leave the readers alone and let the blogsphere work for them.

  11. George Avatar
    George

    Totalitarianism will ride in on a wave of consumer convenience. Wouldn’t it be kind of creepy if everyone had a single username/password for all sources of information, like a universal cookie? Even more convenient to record it magnetically on your national ID card.
    Better to let the market work. Sure, registration is irritating and boring; consumers know it and sites know it; that’s part of the cost of using the site. If the cost is too high, don’t use it. Thus I registered at the NYT but don’t really care enough about the Post to take the time.

  12. Jeff Avatar
    Jeff

    Please! Don’t start a new initiative for this. Use Passport (http://www.passport.com) or Liberty (http://www.projectliberty.org) for this.

  13. Anne Haight Avatar
    Anne Haight

    The NYT is sufficiently irritating without making me register to read it. I can get a few articles there from blogs and people posting it on forums for others who don’t want to register.
    Besides, I never give them valid registration data anyway, so what good is it to them?

  14. Arnold Kling Avatar
    Arnold Kling

    See http://tinyurl.com/ys3k7 where I argued three years ago (and in fact several years prior to that) that content providers need to band together in clubs rather than remain in separate silos.

  15. Steven I. Weiss Avatar
    Steven I. Weiss

    I’m sorry to say, the Forward requires registration…but not for the blogs!
    When I was at Protocols and freelancing, I felt comfortable advertising a public username/password; I haven’t asked about doing that on Fiddish for the Forward, but I’m assuming it’d make someone unhappy.
    C’est la vie.

  16. Bryan C Avatar
    Bryan C

    Does anyone at the paper actually look at the data they collect, or do they prefer to pretend that it’s accurate?
    Our local paper requires registration. For a while they dropped it, but then they switched over to that incredibly awful ZWire portal shared by a lot of smaller papers and turned it back on again. I have it on good authority that the switch generated a lot of complaints from unhappy visitors to the site. But I guess unverifiable demographic information collected under duress from annoyed readers carries more weight than feedback from actual customers. Considering the quality of the paper that would not surprise me at all.

  17. poppy Avatar
    poppy

    Individual registration keeps the nonlocal readers away, which keeps down server load and serves ads to people who might patronize the advertisers.
    Universal registration would destroy this.