This week, The New York Times decided to make life a little less convenient for college students everywhere by ending free unlimited access to their online content. While I realize that the Times is a business in a struggling industry and that they have to meet the bottom line somehow, I can’t justify spending $20 a month on a website when I spend significant amounts of my time scrounging for laundry money. So my poverty, combined with my constitutional distaste for authority and pointless rules, has led me to search out the best places to find free news that is actually news and not infotainment.
You Can Still Read The New York Times For Free
I have always been a great appreciator of the broadsheet newspaper. There’s nothing quite like eating breakfast over a newspaper, and when I moved away from home I was afraid I would never experience this simple joy again. Luckily, Boston University wants you to know what’s going on in the world, and you can find free copies of The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal in various locations throughout campus. The papers usually disappear by mid-afternoon, but copies are stocked in the College of Communication building and outside the West Campus mailroom on weekdays.
If carrying a paper around isn’t for you, though, there are ways to access the Times online free. If you follow any link to the Times from Twitter – and you aren’t logged in to your New York Times account, that part is crucial – the article won’t count towards your total. The same goes for globenewswire.com, where everything available on the news can be read from here. This, of course, deprives you of the pleasure of browsing a page, reading a paragraph and then deciding which article to read but c’est la vie.
The New York Times Is Not The Only Good News Source
The Times is perhaps the biggest name in American print media, but it is by no means the only name. The Washington Post is free online, and The Wall Street Journal allows you to read certain articles for free (though their system of allowing you to read the first two sentences of breaking news stories and then cutting you off is perhaps more infuriating than the Times’ new limits). The Economist, Time, Mother Jones, and many other magazines all have free access to online content. The BBC also has free online content, and I particularly enjoy reading their take on US events, which sometimes includes ridiculous phrases like “California-cool” in a completely un-ironic context.
Leaving the familiar world of print media, there are, of course, blogs. I am personally not a huge fan of blogs as a news source because in my experience they are heavily biased, but some stand out. The Huffington Post is always good for a basic overview of events, though it rarely (if ever) delves very deep into the issues. If you happen to be obsessed with politics, Politico is a great resource, though it lacks non-political news. For those of you trying to escape the liberal media, The Daily Caller is a slightly less informative but entertaining take on political events, with a conservative tilt.
Hopefully these resources will be enough to satiate your desire for news without driving you to actually pay for the things our generation has become accustomed to getting for free. There is always hope that the Times’ subscription plan will go the way of their previous efforts at online subscriptions. And if all else fails, we can take solace in the fact that The Daily Show is back on Hulu.
Hey Annie — As someone who arrived on campus 40 years ago this fall — and who has worked as a journalist ever since leaving BU in 1975 — seeing an article headlined “How To Get The News For Free” leads me to point out: You get what you pay for. Maybe not today, or tomorrow. But someday, for sure.