23 March 2011

How to bypass the paywall at the New York Times

Those of you who are active web surfers will know that next week the New York Times will be instituting a payment system for frequent users.  Neiman Journalistic Lab discusses the details and offers four lines of Javascript that can be used to bypass the popup overlay.

Perhaps of more relevance to the casual visitor, their new paywall will not require payment from readers who access fulltext on fewer than twenty articles a month.  And as Gizmodo points out, another way to bypass the payment requirement is to access the New York Times article via a link from a blog -
Readers who come to Times articles through links from search, blogs and social media like Facebook and Twitter will be able to read those articles, even if they have reached their monthly reading limit.
TYWKIWDBI will continue to feature links to New York Times articles (I just checked my archives and find about 180 links there in the past three years).  I like the New York Times, in part because its article skimmer is so clean and so easy to use.  More importantly, the content is superb.  That's why it's on my list of sites to visit biweekly, and I've often said that if there were any site I would be willing to pay $ to visit, it would be the NYT.

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