The Sacramento Bee website will soon require registration to access their content. It is hard to believe that they’ve thought this through when question #16 in their FAQ looks like this:
16. How do I subscribe or unsubscribe to a newsletter?
You can sign up for any of the sacbee.com or SacTicket.com newsletters by selecting the appropriate fields during the registration process. Or sign up by visiting GT THIS URL FROM KEVIN. You can unsubscribe from any newsletter by clicking the unsubscribe link at the bottom of the newsletter.
I wonder if they’ll be watching bugmenot.com for sacbee.com accounts (there is already one account listed). When will news sites learn that they’ll need to provide greater motivation for user accounts than just access to their content.
UPDATE 3:15pm 25 Jan 2005: Looks like the Modesto Bee has also started down the registration road. Both papers are owned by the same folks as far as I know. A quick peak at Netcraft indicates that the sites are being hosted on FreeBSD (cool!) systems at Nando Media.