Per Justin in comments below, it appears the Knoxville News Sentinel website no longer requires registration to access/read news articles. I just tried it by logging out and deleting all my Knoxnews cookies, and it appears you are able to access articles without being registered.

There's no official announcement or any mention at Michael Silence or on McElroy's blog. I'll try to get confirmation. Hopefully it's a permanent change. If so, the KNS has made a smart decision.

UPDATE: The KNS is apparently declining any official response or announcement. Instead, I was directed to this [1]. I suspected it might be some kind of experiment or trial run, because they were being so quiet about it.

I can sort of see not wanting to make a big deal about it for fear of admitting a mistake or seeming to back down in the face of complaints from, you know, readers. And I can see why they might want people to think they still need to register so they get more names in their database. But if you don't tell anybody about a change, how can you measure the effect of the change? And why wouldn't you want to promote the fact that you made a positive change based on reader feedback? Weird. Anyway, I hope their experiment works and this remains a permanent change. Bloggers can help by linking to lots of articles at KNS.

UPDATE: Michael Silence got an official response [2] from the General Manager of Interactive Media for Scripps.