Dialog Box

Many newspaper sites these days put up a ‘subscription curtain’ where some (or all) of their content or archives are restricted to subscribers only.

It’s always disappointing to me when I want to post some of my favorite pieces from these papers to share. Obviously, this is one way for print media to maintain a business model on the internet, but it does tend to stymie the exciting possibilities of community learning that the web provides.

Today, however, a wonderful newspaper living behind a subscription curtain is coming out — if only for a week. Now through May 8, anyone can access the entire site at The Chronicle of Higher Education.

The Chronicle is truly a top-notch publication, with some of the best in-depth reporting out there (on any subject). Their beat is (obviously) higher education, but their reporting and features will, I’m sure, resonate with readers of many different interests.

Of particular note, the Chronicle‘s coverage of the Virginia Tech shootings has been superb, and I highly recommend reading through not only their detailed reporting on the subject, but especially their well-written opinion essays that begin to cope with the many issues presented by the tragedy.

I’ll recommend a few links below — hopefully, you can visit before the site goes back behind the curtain May 8!

(Thanks to “pukalski” at stock.xchng for her curtain image that I’ve appropriated).

A ‘proposal’ from veteran web designers Hop Studios asks “What if news sites were built for sharing instead of for telling?” and then answers the question with tickr — a proposed mashup between flickr‘s celebrated Web 2.0 community interface and traditional news outlet content.

While they allude to sites like Wikipedia, they focus on flickr‘s model, because they feel it is highly influential and has innate loyalty-building properties. To me, though, it looks like there’s a heavy wiki influence here.

The observations about the most useful (and popular) UI elements of flickr are interesting to consider, though. Sites like Wikipedia could certainly be improved by some of their logical suggestions, and it would indeed be interesting to see a working news wiki community site like the proposed tickr.

(Thanks, Magnetbox — a blog with one of the most creative looks I’ve seen!)