Kevin Drum at Political Animal is venting about the proliferation of logins at newspaper sites. We have heard that this is going to be the way things work, and I still hope we can come up with a centralized registration process, at least within news site networks.
So what are the next steps out there, people? I think that while bloggers are in a unique position on this matter as they are very likely to land on many, many more newspaper sites than the average online reader, the gap between those individuals and a person who gets most of their news online but isn’t a blogger is probably not that far - so it’s a widespread issue. The key here to realize is that while it is annoying for you to have to come up with a login/password at every single newspaper, the folks on the other end of the content are in business to provide you the news, and the “free-ness” of the Internet has a very real cost that is just transparent to the reader (well, unless you don’t have a popup blocker).
[update: 11:15pm, 4/28/04] Robert Cox at The National Debate writes about an idea of how to coordinate some sort of “easy” registration through blogs where access to newspapers would be available. While it wouldn’t be the alpha and omega of simplifying access to news sites online, it could be one solution that at least helps for blog readers and publishers alike.
