It's actually free. At least the first paragraph or so is. And a lot of the personal finance articles are totally free. About 99% of the time that's good enough for me.
So I don't bypass the paywall. I go to WSJ on a daily basis and simply read the free intro text.
I enjoy the WSJ enough that I would gladly pay them, except they play the usual pricing games, which I detest. I wish they just gave me their "best" price, and never tried to jack up that price to whatever they thought they could get away with at renewal. On a few occasions I've had a 1 year subscription for IIRC perhaps $99 but at renewal they tried to jack up the price substantially.
They've been playing these pricing games on and off for at least 10 years, if not longer. I have been willing to pay them at least $1,000 over that time. Instead they've gotten at most $200. But they're not alone in this. Most newspapers and magazines follow that pricing model.
OTOH the NY Times is great. I always clear cookies and browse w/o Javascript and I can read all the articles for free. This is a deliberate decision on their part. Still, I probably don't spend more than a few minutes a day on their site, so it's not like they could get $100/yr from me.
For a while, the NY Times was hilariously free. News articles were free, while they charged for their "editorial" content. That was perhaps a good idea for their core NYC demographic, but for other people (like me) the opposite would have been more attractive. How much would it cost me to keep from ever even seeing a headline for anything written by Maureen Dowd? Alas, that pricing model has long since changed.
It's actually free. At least the first paragraph or so is. And a lot of the personal finance articles are totally free. About 99% of the time that's good enough for me.
So I don't bypass the paywall. I go to WSJ on a daily basis and simply read the free intro text.
I enjoy the WSJ enough that I would gladly pay them, except they play the usual pricing games, which I detest. I wish they just gave me their "best" price, and never tried to jack up that price to whatever they thought they could get away with at renewal. On a few occasions I've had a 1 year subscription for IIRC perhaps $99 but at renewal they tried to jack up the price substantially.
They've been playing these pricing games on and off for at least 10 years, if not longer. I have been willing to pay them at least $1,000 over that time. Instead they've gotten at most $200. But they're not alone in this. Most newspapers and magazines follow that pricing model.
OTOH the NY Times is great. I always clear cookies and browse w/o Javascript and I can read all the articles for free. This is a deliberate decision on their part. Still, I probably don't spend more than a few minutes a day on their site, so it's not like they could get $100/yr from me.
For a while, the NY Times was hilariously free. News articles were free, while they charged for their "editorial" content. That was perhaps a good idea for their core NYC demographic, but for other people (like me) the opposite would have been more attractive. How much would it cost me to keep from ever even seeing a headline for anything written by Maureen Dowd? Alas, that pricing model has long since changed.