Straits Times delusions

Stupid straits times interactive. Also, interactive my foot. wishful faddish word attachment, never could stand the site, not only does it hang and load slowly and fail to keep archives, its just shit lah. But people kept sending me links to articles, so i registered, and answered a great many unnecessary rude and intrusive questions in order to do so, and then what, 3 weeks later, they say, we're going to start charging money for this, and so there. Their stupid notification email was so rude too! As if they didn't have to sell it, just had to notify the public, whether they liked it or not.

My god.

After 10 years of giving ST news reports out for free online, STI will begin charging readers to access it.

Also,

We believe that we have a good and valuable product that users will want to pay for. It's also not a tenable business model to charge for the print edition of the newspaper and not for its online edition.

This last bit is my favourite:

You will want to know whether you will get anything more, now that you have to pay.

The answer is yes.

You will notice that up till now, you get only three reports from Life! and Sunday Life through the week. If you subscribe, all the showbiz gossip and lifestyle features you see in the print edition of Life will be available online.

The weekly tech magazine Digital Life is available online now but a day after its print edition goes out with the newspaper. If you subscribe, Digital Life and the health magazine Mind Your Body -- now not online -- will become available from 6am on the same day they are distributed with the newspaper. The fashion magazine Urban will also go online, but later this year.

All news reports in the Money section will be available from 6am daily, instead of 6pm.

The last perk is that the archive will grow from the current three-days to seven-days. This means you can search back a week's worth of STI editions.

You can almost taste the rather particular and .. tiny little shrivelling mindset that thought that up, wrote it down, and then decided, yes. that makes sense!

It was a flawed product to start with, but still somewhat useful, because people live overseas or don't get the print edition or just prefer to scroll and click rather than turn pages, Whatever. But now, they're going to charge money for it, because that would make their business plan tenable, and in return, you'll get something that's only marginally better than before, and still less than one might expect of something you Pay for, considering the sheer volume of free quality news and everything else available on line.

Tenable Business Model!!!

I can't get that phrase out of my head now.

As YJ put it best, good riddance.

I'm not paying for propaganda.