Old Media Fail: Pay The WSJ To Read About NYT Charging Users?

There’s some irony at work here. The dinosaurific Wall Street Journal has posted a story about The New York Times establishing a pay wall for its stories. Trouble is, you have to pay to read it. At some point the old media is going to figure this whole internet thing out and kick all our asses to the curb. Just not yet.

Would Vancouver Coffee Shops Ever Pull The Free WiFi Plug?

Other North American cities are beginning to wake up and smell the consequences. From The Wall Street Journal:

A sign at Naidre’s, a small neighborhood coffee shop in Brooklyn, N.Y., begins warmly: “Dear customers, we are absolutely thrilled that you like us so much that you want to spend the day…”

But, it continues, “…people gotta eat, and to eat they gotta sit.” At Naidre’s in Park Slope and its second location in nearby Carroll Gardens, Wi-Fi is free. But since the spring of 2008, no laptops have been allowed between 11 a.m. and 2 p.m. weekdays and 10 a.m. and 3 p.m. weekends, unless the customer is eating and typing at the same time.

Amid the economic downturn, there are fewer places in New York to plug in computers. As idle workers fill coffee-shop tables — nursing a single cup, if that, and surfing the Web for hours — and as shop owners struggle to stay in business, a decade-old love affair between coffee shops and laptop-wielding customers is fading. In some places, customers just get cold looks, but in a growing number of small coffee shops, firm restrictions on laptop use have been imposed and electric outlets have been locked. The laptop backlash may predate the recession, but the recession clearly has accelerated it.

More after the leap… Read more