Martin Schneider writes:

During the World Cup, The New Republic had a pretty cool blog dedicated to the tournament, as they had in 2006. It was a fun, eclectic blog, and I enjoyed it a lot. I even wrote a post about Luke Dempsey's brilliant found poem.

There were a few times I wanted to chime in a comment or two, as I often do elsewhere in the blogosphere. Much to my surprise, the site demanded that I log in before posting—not with my www.tnr.com account username—which would be fine—but with my New Republic magazine subscription account username.

That's right: if you want to write "first!" in a TNR blog comment thread, you're going to have to buy 20 issues of the magazine. For the record, the page they send you to is here.

Does that business model remind you of anything? The year 2000, maybe?*

======
*I'm sorry if this is coming off as harsh, but it's really meant as tough love. I know it's a bad environment for magazines right now. But TNR pays really well-qualified people to blog for them, and those blogs are pretty awesome, and stuff like this just ensures that the money, time, and energy spent developing those blogs will not attract permanent users.**

** Could it be a browser issue? A cookie issue?