Letter

A word of warning from a loyal reader! I have noticed that there is an increasing tendency for commercial sites to start charging for access to their pages. The latest - and most annoying for me, sitting in London wanting to keep abreast of South African affairs - is the Mail & Guardian. In the last week or so they have switched to 100% paid access by what they call the Kudu Club that you have to subscribe to (even the London "Financial Times" has a site which has a high proportion of items/pages which are free but not the "M&G"). The result is that some of your links involve putting us through to paid sites, which is time consuming and annoying. I just wonder whether you could put up a warning to readers. Or better still persuade these sites to let us get access for free somehow (I'm not a techie but there must be a way to file pages in a way that allows us access).
What do you think?
PZ Replies: Thanks for pointing this out - it is a worrying trend. We make a point of not linking to paid sites or those that require a difficult or tedious registration, but sometimes they manage to sneak through. We're very aware that many of our readers have limited web access and don't want to spend their time online negotiating paid-for sites. If a story of importance comes up on a paid site, then we do our best to source something similar elsewhere.