The Toronto Star and thestar.com announced today that the Company has removed the mandatory registration feature from its Internet site, making it even easier for readers to access Toronto's best site for local, continuously updated news, blogs and information.
"We believe that in order to be competitive in the online news and information space, growth of both audience and page impressions will be the cornerstone of our success. Further, we believe that the key to that growth is through the removal of all barriers, including registration," said Michael Goldbloom, Publisher, Toronto Star. "Our online readers have told us that registration is an inconvenience. We listened to our readers, and we've removed mandatory registration from our site."
thestar.com will continue to gather limited information from online readers who choose to register on a voluntary basis. In addition, there will be some areas of the site that will still require online readers to enter personal information, such as contest forms, placing a classified advertisement, discussions and newsletters.
The Toronto Star and thestar.com are committed to responding to feedback from its readers and as such, will include readers' input and opinions in the redesign of thestar.com, scheduled for 2006.
"thestar.com will begin planning for a full redesign early in the new year," said Sharon Dean, Director of Electronic Publishing, Toronto Star. "We look forward to receiving the valuable feedback that our online readers are known for providing and to including as much of that feedback as possible in the updates that we make to the site."
This is an enlightened step and you should be commended.
Sort of silly requiring people to register and then not verifying their registration information, sure hope you weren't spending a lot of money analyzing the registration data
Posted by: James Sedgwick | December 13, 2005 at 08:30 PM
I think removing registration is a good idea. I agree with removing any restrictions to the site.
Posted by: Chris Williams | December 13, 2005 at 08:32 PM
There are thousands of other newspaper sites out there that should take a hint from the Toronto Star and remove registration requirements as well.
Thank you for making visiting the Toronto Star website an easier and more enjoyable experience!
A subscriber (Online, and print version).
Posted by: oshawapilot | December 13, 2005 at 08:48 PM
Bravo! I subscribe 7days and read online. Am I a Star fanatic? No. Sometimes its just convienent to access on the web and search archives too.
Now, if publisher Goldbloom could just bring the Editor of the Hamilton Spectator into the 20th century....
Posted by: brian michenko | December 13, 2005 at 09:34 PM
I'm glad to hear you've done this.
I've been reading for several years now and visit at least once a day.
Of course you need some way to validate how many readers you've got, but I'm sure you can do that with cookies and/or network traces.
Richard
Posted by: Richard Mann | December 13, 2005 at 09:48 PM
Your ''STAR'' is the BEST newspaper,as the other ones require the nuisance registration & also one is at times told to subscribe in order to continue the storyline ,which defeats the purpose of being on the web anyway!!So as you can guess,consequently,I,& a lot of others I'm sure,do not even bother to look at!
We are living in B.C. at the moment,But hope to return to Toronto next year,So that is another reason to enjoy your news on line Bravo to you ,we shall remain faithfull readers!
Posted by: iris shikatani | December 14, 2005 at 03:59 AM
Any future redesign of the site must go much farther in terms of standards compliance and accessibility. Among other things, designing for a known-broken browser like IE6 *first* is a method that will lead to more work to fix mistakes than designing to spec first and tweaking for IE6 later.
Posted by: Joe Clark | December 14, 2005 at 02:36 PM