YDR Insider

This is a story about paywalls and dancing.

Or maybe about how our paywall or online subscription on our websites can make you dance.

A teacher emailed me about resources for a new unit she’s teaching on major criminal cases and crimes in York County history.

She named some of the cases of interest, including the Witman case. Some students are going to analyze the case and have an interest in the guilt of Zachary Witman, incarcerated in the murder of his brother.

I started sending her links to my blog about major capital cases as well as the Daily Record’s takeout raising questions about Zachary’s guilt.

So I sent her a good half dozen links to our sites.

Here’s where the dance comes in.

Here I was aiding a teacher, and I was running her into the paywall.

Would she think I was giving her all these links for us to make money?

How does this conflict with our efforts to get electronic newspapers (NIE)  into the classroom to further readership?

Should I say anything?

But if she thought that, is there anything wrong with that? There was a cost for us to create, edit and post all those stories and photos on capital crimes. I mean, lawyers wouldn’t do such research for free. Some would charge you for opening your emailed query, in the first place.

Still, I get requests like this virtually every day and often feel compelled to dance, to add in a disclaimer as it were.

“You might run into a paywall on the ydr and blog sites,” I wrote my reply to my teacher friend.  “Your librarian might have a subscription.”

So, that’s the linkup between paywalls and dancing.

Oh yes, still dancing.

You can click on posts  in this YDR Insider blog and you won’t hit a paywall. We didn’t hook up an online subscription to this blog.

But if you click on the five links embedded in this post, you will be taken to paywalled stories. After five stories, you’ll hit the wall.

 Also of interest:

For more posts about paywalls, visit: Online subscription.

Web, mobile, tablet technology causes revisions in York, Pa., news media history

Paywall a new part of newsroom speech. Here’s another one: crowdsourcing.