Subscription firewall consigned to dustbin at Rochester Post Bulletin

Early on Thanksgiving, we noticed that the subscription firewall at the Rochester Post Bulletin was gone. A staff member has confirmed that it has gone the way of the 8-track tape player, so those following politics in the Fighting First can now freely access the daily paper in the district's largest population center.

That change earlier in the week made this Friday post at Vox Verax look a bit outdated, but all's well that ends well.  Not only are recent stories accessible, but the free archives go back all the way to 1989.

Maybe the Post Bulletin will use Google News' tools to get itself in the daily feed for those who rely on news alerts and feeds. That should rectify the absence of Post Bulletin stories in Google News searches. 

Now that the Post Bulletin is fully accessible online, somebody should go over to Tim Walz's Wikipedia entry right now and replace a citation of a Bluestem Prairie post with a link to the original Post Bulletin article by Ed Felker. 

Given our bias, we shouldn't be the ones to edit the entry. That might, we dunno, look bad.

Comments

[Leigh Pomeroy]

This is great news for Rochester and, in the long run, the Post-Bulletin.

It is ironic that the newspaper changed its policy the day before I posted "Web accessibility and smaller market newspapers".

Bluestem Prairie and Vox Verax have both been critical of the Post-Bulletin's "closed site" policy in the past. Could that criticism have been a factor in making the change? I certainly hope so.