Dear San Jose Mercury News:
I typically read your paper’s website every day — after I read the San Francisco Chronicle and the Washington Post — but am usually dismayed at the shallow reporting and lack of important… well, news.
Yours is one of those annoying sites that requires a pointless login. It’s not as if you are charging for the content, you just want a lot of marketing data. Up until now, as with the Washington Post, I’ve put up with it because I can simply grab a login ID from bugmenot.com and get on with it. But now you’ve implemented an email verification system. In order to read the weak content of your site, I would have to sign up for access, give my valid email address, and then respond to an email before I can get into your site.
Not worth it. Not even remotely.
This is no way to run a website. Your advertisers just lost my eyeballs for no very good reason.
And I’m not contemplating ever buying your paper, it just doesn’t have compelling content or sophisticated journalism, and I can’t be bothered to go out of my way to buy one.
And the Chronicle doesn’t expect me to give away my personal information in exchange for real news and excellent columnists.
Now I know why natives call you the Murky News.
Love,
Gene
