I am well aware of many work arounds. The point of this post was to show wapo has changed the way gift articles work, which previously didn’t require a workaround
I don't disagree, but ideally quality journalism should be treated as a public good, as it's, well, a source of information about the world, an extention of education, you could say
A lot of European countries have tax-supported independent news organizations
I'd rather fund quality original news none-for-profit. But all major news articles are in it for the money. How do you expect me to pay for something that has a vested interest in making money off the stuff they report?
I am fine paying for news. My main problem is these newspapers use manipulation to spread their news. They use cookies to limit the number of articles you can read. This allows people that can see the article thinking everyone else can. Also the entire article can be read by search engines. So when people are searching for certain info, the find the article and they are paywalled. It's a major waste of time. Just don't allow those articles to be searched then.
On top of all that the offers the give are introductory. They will have a signifcant jump afterwards. They will hound you to resubscribe and sell your information for as much as they legally (usually) can.
Pro tip: the login wall is added at the end of page load. If you tap the Esc key at the right moment to interrupt the load, you'll end up with the full article rendered without the bullshit
You can't provide any email address, by the looks of it. Even a Gmail address (which I assume would be most likely to be whitelisted) fails. Guess that's one way to force subscriptions...