I’ve ruminated recently about Rupert Murdoch and the paywall he intends to erect around his sites sometime in the near future. Recently, daringfireball.net linked to a WSJ article, and I found myself wondering how much longer those links would keep coming, and how much I would miss them. It occurred to me that there isn’t enough quality distinction between the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times (and the rest of the news sites I read) for it to matter to me.

The only publications I would even consider paying to read are ArsTechnica and HardOCP. Not for the news articles, mind you, but for the in-depth reporting and reviews. I hadn’t bothered to read any of the Snow Leopard reporting anywhere on the internet before Ars published John Siracusa’s 23 page article. There’s no point – I know John is going to get it right, cover it properly, and do his research before talking about the details of the OS. Pretty much everyone else is going to be racing to get theirs out first. For investigative technology reporting – be it an operating system review, a wiretapping scandal, or coverage of the App Store review process – my primary source is Ars. When it comes to hardware reviews for motherboards, power supplies, or honest numbers for video cards, I go to HardOCP.

For everything else, I don’t care as much about who has it first, or even right, as long as it has an RSS feed I can consume in Google Reader. I read the headlines of eveything, and short summaries of the articles. If I’m really interested, I’ll actually pop the article open and see what’s going on. But I make a point to try to read the same story (or the headlines, or the intro paragraph) from as many different newspapers as possible. This way some of the bias is removed as people try to think of different ways to spin things. I assume the truth is somewhere in the middle, and keep on going.

So, sure, Mr. Murdoch. Put up your paywall. I wonder if anyone will even bother to come look.