Welcome to our archives!

As of early this week, all Wareham Week and WarehamVillageSoup.com stories -- from our launch in 2010 up to the current day -- are freely available online. One need not be a paying "Premium iMember" of our site  to be able to read everything in our archives.

When Wareham Week and WarehamVillageSoup launched nearly four years ago, the theory was that our most devoted readers would be willing to pay a small fee -- $10 annually -- to be able to read all the archives, to set up and maintain a blog, to get a discount on classified advertising and to help support community journalism.

In reality, restricting the archives to paying members simply annoyed almost everyone.

Readers of our free paper could not figure out why older online content was being placed behind a so-called "pay wall." Even those who agreed that $10 annually was not going to break anyone's budget had little interest in filling out a form and digging out a credit card just to able to look at an old story -- or having to remember user name and password to log in to look at another old story the next day.

Heck, even the staff was annoyed. Every time a reporter wanted to link a current story to an older story to provide background and context, he or she had to go poking about in our system and rejigger the settings on the old story to make it easily available to all readers.

'Nough said. As the Christmas trees went up, the pay wall came down.

We still welcome members of the community to spend $10 a year to host a blog on our site, get a discount on classified advertising and help support community journalism. But no one need now spend it to read what we wrote three months or three years ago.

Happy New Year and happy reading!