A few weeks ago the Financial Times re-designed its web site to mixed reviews. I quite like the new design, which makes the site much easier to read, but the silly subscription packages are getting on my nerves:
- Unregistered browsers of ft.com can read three free articles every 30 days.
- Register at no charge and you can read up to 19 articles in any 30-day period.
- Subscribe for £98.99 per year and you can access an unlimited number of articles any time you like.
- Pay the FT £199.00 annually and you can read Lex, its "agenda-setting column on business and financial topics".
I've been a registered user for a long time, but since September's banking crisis I have hit the limit of 19 free articles a month on many occasions. The latest frustrating experience occurred today. The paper has published Jancis Robinson's red wine recommendations for this holiday season, but due to the site's article constraint I am not allowed to view the page!
Such frustration is not to be tolerated, so I simply switched to Ms Robinson's own web site, where she always posts her FT articles in full. Fortunately this week was no exception — except that there were three times as many recommended wines on her site as there were in the FT article. In the author's own words:
Every year I try to assemble a collection of wines for Financial Times readers that I think should be drinking particularly well for celebrations over the year end. There is a horrible shortage of space in the paper so I had to trim my list considerably for the pink pages - down to 30 from a total of 100 - but the following is the list in full, culled from the thousands of wines I have tasted over the last few months.
So what's the point of the FT's frustrating limitations? It's almost always possible to obtain the information published on the web site from another source, if not for free then for much less than the cost of an annual subscription. Restricting access only serves to drive readers elsewhere. It's an approach that risks marginalizing the UK's National Newspaper of the Year 2008.
