I hate the New York Times

Fre­quent­ly, well-mean­ing friends or col­leagues send me links to arti­cles on the New York Times web­site: nytimes.com. I think it was ten years ago when I first jumped through their “give us per­son­al infor­ma­tion about your­self in exchange for free access to our arti­cles” hoops. Since then, EVERY TIME I’ve want­ed to see an arti­cle on their god­for­sak­en site I’ve had to cre­ate a brand-new login. I don’t know whether its their pol­i­cy to throw away accounts old­er than 30 days or what, but I have not even once been able to get back on to their site using a pre­vi­ous­ly-estab­lished user­name and password.

It’s ridicu­lous. I don’t know what sort of crack­heads they have doing web­dev over there at the New York Times, but most of the time I just give up. There is noth­ing I real­ly need at the New York Times web­site except for shit­ty jour­nal­ism that can’t even call itself biased; just shod­dy. Pfaugh!

So once again, I got a link to an arti­cle about Alan Moore’s reac­tion to the film adap­ta­tion of his V for Vendet­ta and intrigued, I went to read it. Sure enough, once again I was unable to get at the site and unable to find an email address that it would send a pass­word to.

I went through my email archives look­ing for past pass­word noti­fi­ca­tions and I found lots of “dear sub­scriber” emails from nytimes.com. I entered those address­es in to the “lost pass­word” form on their site: no go.

So at this point am I plan­ning on fill­ing out their form and telling them how much I earn in a year and what col­or under­wear I pre­fer? Hell no. The New York Times can take their arti­cles and.… well, use your imagination.