Some issues keep reappearing over the years. One is for news sites that have mandatory user-registration schemes and what they do when a big local story breaks.
Staci Kramer at
PaidContent.org reported last week that
The Telegraph in London "made a big mistake (after the bombings in that city last week) by limiting access to registered users and sending hurried users to other sites. A better bet would be to create a breaking news section anyone can access for now and and remind people to register for full access."
I've said here many times that I think mandatory registration for news sites is counterproductive, and nothing has changed my mind. Voluntary user registration with incentives is the way to go, in my view.
Had
The Telegraph wanted to allow everyone to see its breaking London-bombings news, yet not temporarily shut down its website registration, it could have included a voluntary registration request at the top of pages offering bombing coverage -- which casual visitors could ignore and scroll down if they were in a hurry to see the page content. The paper's website would have served the public and gotten some voluntary registrations using this scheme; instead, it just lost visitors to other news sites.
