Low tech solutions to paywall problems

A note from Ruth Gledhill 

Thank you for subscribing to The Times and reading this far. I have decided to become a human ‘RSS feed’. I will send out at least one daily email, sent blind to all recipients so no email addresses of other subscribers or commenters are revealed, of updates to the blog.

This actually worries me more than anything else about the Great Paywall of Wapping. Not that Ruth is doing this – that shows a fabulous respect for her readers and understanding that a blog is a community –  but the fact that there isn’t and RSS feed. It can’t be beyond the wit of their technical team to publish a feed that either was free to air, but only contained the link, a headline and perhaps an excerpt, or a full text feed that required authentication (and RSS readers have supported authentication for years).

With RSS apps starting to get some traction on mobile devices, this really betrays a deep lack of understanding somewhere in their organisation about how their most engaged – and therefore the most likely to pay – actually find their way to the content.