My point is that, journalism is free because they are subsidized by advertisements. If you as an individual want to go directly to the print page... of course that's fine. It's great that you have that option.
However, when posting a link on a site that will likely generate hundreds of hits (3% of which might click the ad), its only fair to THE COMPANY to post to their main site.
I dint get how this is rude, it would be trivial for THE COMPANY to add a few lines to their server configuration to redirect all incoming traffic from anywhere (or even just HN or Reddit) to redirect seamlessly to the non-print page that has both the ads and a print button....but this site hasn't done that (yet).
I don't think it's really that big of a deal. If it was a subscription service we were all bypassing without paying that's one thing, but this is just another page on their public website like anything else.
If you don't want people to see it, don't publish it online.
That doesn't really go far enough: If people don't buy more of the products being advertised as a result of the ad then the advertisers will stop running the ads and WaPo will lose revenue. That's not fair to WaPo.
Everyone should promise to buy whatever product is being advertised or at least convince themselves that their brain patterns have been changed so that they are more likely to buy the product in the future.
However, when posting a link on a site that will likely generate hundreds of hits (3% of which might click the ad), its only fair to THE COMPANY to post to their main site.