Policy on linking to the Arizona Daily Sun

Update - The Daily Sun now makes all its archived materials freely available.  There is a search engine on the site, although it doesn't always work for me.  So, I will leave up my original comment, below, just for the sake of completeness.

The Daily Sun will leave current articles, letters and editorials freely posted on the web for just a few days after publication.  Then, you must access their archive to retrieve these postings.  They charge about $3 for each posting, which is about $3 more than they are worth, and I can't imagine that they actually make any money off individual downloads.  If you subscribe to the paper, you get 25 retrievals for free each month, although they don't roll over.  I would suspect that that the average number of downloads per month, for subscribers, to be well less than 1.0, and maybe less than 0.01, or even 0.001.

If you are associated with NAU, using your school ID will allow you to freely access the Daily Sun's archive through Cline Library.  Maybe NAU pays the paper for this access and that is how they (the Daily Sun) can actually make income off of this.  I don't know.  But, if this is the case, I would hope that NAU officials are keeping track of how frequently this access is utilized in order to determine if the cost is worthwhile.

I think this policy is short-sighted and I would urge the management to make past articles and commentaries freely available on-line.  As a consequence of this, I will not link directly to Daily Sun articles, letters or editorials.  If you want to look them up, you can do so - the dates would correspond to my blog dates, or will be referenced in longer essays.  Or, you can go to their web site and do a search.