I’m on the road and trying to see what’s up at home. Raleigh’s finest newspaper, the News and Observer, has chosen to lock up its content behind a paywall. Yeah, I subscribe to the dead tree edition, but that’s not the point.

Newspaper websites get a lot of visitors from links, which means their online ads get a lot of viewers. This of course means the newspaper site can raise their advertising rates, which you would think would make them very happy. Instead they insist on hiding their content, which drastically reduces their traffic. The N&O is a decent-sized paper, but I’ll go out on a limb here and say that there are, oh, more N&O nonsubscribers on the Internet than subscribers. A move like this shoots themselves in the foot.

Craigslist is the new classified section. Google News is the new wire service. Your neighbor’s syndication feeds cover local issues better than any newspaper can. In an age whem the Internet makes newspapers increasingly irrelevant, why accelerate it by disappearing from the web?

Thus I’m implementing a moratorium on linking to any News and Observer stories. There are plenty of other online sources for local news.

(Bonus: I find it amusing the N&O makes you register even to simply read their registration frequently asked questions.)

Update: Looks like I can call off my moratorium. Links that were blocked two hours ago are now working fine. I wonder what happened?