TechDirt is reporting that the registered delegate Press is poised to be the next in a long line of news organizations to altogether bungle their online order methods by making their content require payment. While this wouldn't happen for a while due to deals with others, like Google, to ration AP content for free, even seeing this is a massive step in the wrong direction. "Also, I know we point this out every time some clueless news exec claims that users need to pay, but it's worth attributing again: nowhere do they discuss why people should want to pay. Nowhere do they explain what extra value they're adding that will make people pay. Instead, they think that if they put up a paywall, people will magically pay -- even though the paywall itself is what takes away much of the value by making it harder for people to do what they want with the news: to spread it, to comment on it, to carry on in the story. Until bi-weekly execs figure this out, they're only going to keep making things worse."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Mark