Jeff Sonderman has been pointing out, on his Twitter feed, that many of the newspaper's announcements about their own paywalls are really bad reporting. Now it looks like Steve Buttry has written up a blog post pointing out just how bad these newspapers are at announcing their own paywalls.

They give misleading headlines, they pretend that paywalls are some huge journalistic advance (rather than just a business model choice -- and one that's been tried and failed a bunch), and most importantly, they all totally bury the lede, and don't bring up the paywall until many paragraphs into the article. In the online announcements from The Tallahassee Democrat, the Greenville News and the St. George Spectrum, the paywall isn't even mentioned on the first page of each of those articles. Instead, you have to click through to the later pages to even find out what the announcements are about! Talk about burying the lede...

All three waste the beginning of their articles talking up how great they are and how important they are, as newspapers, to their community. But it's all just a way to try to butter people up before hitting them with "so now we're charging for access to our web content." They're acting as if they think their readers are stupid -- which isn't exactly a strong selling point for getting people to pay you money.

More ... http://techdirt.com/articles/20100628/0255429988.shtml