Much has been written about the impending death of newspapers. The wealth of information on the Internet is of course threatening the existence of newspapers, where what you are reading is filtered by editors that you may not agree with, can lag actual events by up to 24 hours (!), and costs money.

I actually like reading newspapers. Once or twice a week I will relax at lunch and go through either the National Post or Globe and Mail. It gives me an opportunity to actually cogitate, as opposed to the web experience which, to me, is more frantic and random.

The point of this post, though, is how newspapers are trying to build online presences. Both of the mentioned newspapers have online versions with extra functionality, such as the ability for readers to write comments. This is very nice. Today I was looking at the Post’s website, and ran across a particularly ridiculous article that deserved to be commented on. I felt compelled to do so.

The first difficulty presented was the fact that I had to sign up to comment. This is an unfortunate necessity, as no accepted standard for universal online ID management has emerged, and they need a mechanism for filtering out the vi@gra comments. So, I filled in my info and submitted it. I then tried to comment, but discovered that I had to “upgrade” my account to be able to participate in discussions. This is a bit strange. I’m not quite sure what the point of an un-upgraded account is, as it doesn’t seem capable of doing anything. Anyway, I pressed the “upgrade” button, and discovered that I had to click on a link from an email that they sent me, to prove that my email address is correct. I clicked on the link, and the resulting website said “E-Mail Address Not Found.” So, I must confirm my email address to comment, but I can’t confirm my email address.

I suspect the problem is that the email address I gave them is a Gmail address with a “+” in it. Using a + in Gmail is a technique for filtering incoming email from places you’ve signed up. My suspicion is that the Post’s email address parser has trouble with the “+” character.

Anyway, the outcome was that I wasted 10 minutes, still can’t write comments on the article, have another email address floating around out there in their system, and have a little less respect for newspapers’ abilities to move beyond their current business model.