[cft]

The Economist, The New York Times, SF Chronicle have extracted their full brand value from me and there's nothing left. What I mean by this is that when I see their links, I know that the article will be unreadable, because either they will make me jump through some "created free account" hoops to read it, or there will be so many CPU intensive ads or banners "you have read 2 out of your 3 free articles per month" that they make the content effectively inaccessible, especially on a phone. As a result, these brands started to me associated with "unreadable" and "desperate" as opposed to be "reliable" in my mind, and I don't bother to open these links anymore.

[AceJohnny2]

I'm an Economist and NYT (and LATimes, and WaPo...) subscriber, because journalism doesn't come out of happy thoughts and thin air, and that remains true even if I'm unhappy with their coverage of some topics.

I got the article page directly. Clean, readable, no ads all over the place.

You get what you pay for.

[mediaman]

You aren't their customer. People who pay for content are their customer. I doubt they (especially the Economist) very much care what nonpaying readers think.

The Economist still has good analysis on the happenings of the world that many people continue to pay for.

[tdb7893]

The problems is that good journalism is expensive. We all know how annoying ads and paywalls are here but it's hard to get enough people to actually want to pay for the content.

[nicky0]

Becauase it would be ridiculous to actually pay for journalism.