If you've been coming here for the "Fargo Life" tidbits I post, prepare for them to reduce in number: the Fargo Forum is buying the Grand Forks Herald -- which used to be the only regional paper that had Fargo news available without a password. The Forum has pissed me off for years now because I couldn't ever email a link to a friend, link it in a blog, submit an article to Fark, link it on Backwash, use it in an article as Plastic, etc, etc, because there's no way to tell if anybody will ever be able to read it without registering. As the Forum has been buying up regional papers they've been adding their oh-so-inconvenient password protection to the newly acquired websites, so I can expect that unhindered access to the Herald will stop soon, too. Being linked by me isn't a site-altering change, but I can't be the only one: just think how much traffic the Forum, already limited in scope just by interested population, is losing because bloggers can't link directly to stories without it asking for a password. Yes, Forum-believers, I know you can get the first article free, but limiting me to one link during an indeterminate time isn't good enough for me to believe people will actually get the page I'm linking to instead of a login. Having "(subscription)" next to your name in Google News tells people to find the story somewhere else, don't bother stopping there.
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