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28 Jan 2010 22:59

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Biz: The Adventures of Newsday Customer No. 36: Robo-trippin’

  • Newsday breaking news http://www.4info.com/x/bt97 Officials seek more cash to house sex offenders  *Introducing New Robitussin(R) To Go! http://4in.fo/GyeR6A
  • A text message from the Newsday paywall text alert service • Regarding news that’s apparently important enough to send us a text message about. The news itself? Relatively important (whether or not it’s breaking is questionable). What weirds us out, though, is the ad. You have three sentences to break news about something – news we’re paying for – and one of the sentences is a Robitussin ad? (We couldn’t get the link to work, by the way.) We specifically asked not to get offers. This seems sneaky. We were all about to write something positive about their site which is actually useful and worth paying for, and then they had to send us this. Newsday fail. (Note: The link to the article is behind a paywall, and we’re linking to it anyway just so you, too, feel the pain of hitting a paywall. It hurts almost as much as running into a real one.) source

28 Jan 2010 02:00

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Biz: The Adventures of Newsday Customer No. 36: This is breaking?

  • In our first piece of breaking news from Newsday since our $5-a-week paywall infiltration subscription began, we’re informed that a redhead who likes science and his classmates are going to compete for some national award sponsored by Intel. The kids are up for awards of up to $100,000, which is cool. Good luck, guys, but we’re seriously spending $5 a week on this crap? How is this even remotely breaking? There’s nothing heady about it. (BTW, if you want to read the story, you’ll have to subscribe. Them’s the breaks of a paywall.) source