Big apple Post blocks iPad access through Safari browser, hopes you’ll pay for a subscription instead

Well, that’s a method to make people pay for puns. The recent York Post, that bastion of fair, balanced, and never-at-all sensationalistic reporting, has blocked iPad owners from reading its stories throughout the tablet’s Safari browser. If folks want the total spill on Hugh Hefner getting ditched on the altar, they’ll be prompted to download the iOS app, which requires signing up for a subscription starting at $6.99 on a month-to-month basis. Setting aside News Corp.’s hubris for a moment, what’s odd about it really is the variety of workarounds Rupert Murdoch & Co. left us cheapskates. You could read the positioning on a desktop browser or a phone, including an Android one. Basically, then, News Corp. is strangling web access, but just for a select group of readers. That’s a stark contrast from other content providers (even, the scoop Corp-owned Wall Street Journal), that have been more platform-agnostic. Then again, there’s the dim possibility that News Corp. targeted the iPad on the way to re-brand the Post as a glossier form of tabloid, à la The Daily . To which we are saying, that’s some wishful thinking there, Rupe.