‘Newsday, Tear Down This (Pay) Wall!’

OK, he didn’t say exactly that, but it certainly was the driving sentiment behind longtime Newsday contributor Saul Friedman‘s decision to quit after 13 years of banging out a weekly column on aging for the Long Island daily.

The New York Times reports:

Mr. Friedman, who had written a column for Newsday since 1996, quit last week over the paper’s decision to require some readers to pay for access to its Web site.

Customers of Cablevision, the cable and Internet provider that owns Newsday, and people who subscribe to Newsday in print will still be able to browse Newsday.com unfettered. But Newsday recently announced that everyone else will have to pay $5 a week to see much of the site, making it one of the few newspapers in the country to take such a plunge.

Friedman, 80, has been writing for newspapers for more than a half-century. He previously served as a staff writer in Newsday‘s Washington bureau before taking on the Gray Matters column as a freelancer.

More details from Friedman, via Jim Romenesko’s blog at Poynter Online:

The new owners of Newsday, Cablevision, have shut off access to its web site, even to me. It is available only to Newsday subscribers or to subscribers to Cablevision’s ISP. Thus I cannot send my columns to people who don’t subscribe to Newsday.

So a guy who has a long and illustrious career in print journalism — a 1963 Nieman fellow and, even better, a charter member of Richard Nixon’s enemies list — can’t get access to his own column online without paying for it? That’s so lame.

Friedman will continue to write about aging issues at Times Go By, a blog created by longtime journalist Ronni Bennett.

Here’s a link to Newsday‘s paid-subscription policy, which would cost $260 a year to non-print and cable subscribers. I love how they present it:

The new newsday.com

Now available at no charge to Newsday and
Optimum Online® subscribers

And previously available to everybody at no charge! They seem to have left that part out.

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