News of the News

For the past decade or so we've been listening to newspapers and magazines whine about the death of print. The Internet was killing traditional publications. Subscription rates were plummeting, ad revenues were down, life in general sucked if you were a newspaper or magazine publisher. At the same time, those publications created web sites that allowed the entire world to read their content for free. Oddly enough, people don't place a real high value on stuff that costs them nothing. Why subscribe to a hard copy of a newspaper when you could read what you wanted online for free? Eventually most newspapers swung back the other way and began erecting pay walls. You want to read The New York Times or The Washington Post? You get a limited number of free articles each month, and then you hit the pay wall.

Now the AJC -- the Atlanta Journal-Constitution -- has joined the pay wall crowd, albeit with a twist. They must know their audience pretty well. You can still read the news at the AJC site, but apparently they've figured out not many people are actually interested in the news. What do they have hidden behind their pay wall? The games: the crossword puzzles, sudoku, the Jumble, Word Search. . . .  The S.O. is not happy.

Then again, neither am I. It was the AJC, after all, that allowed me to earn my title of Sudoku Queen while working occupying an office at the CDC.