I kind of agree with you but I am not sure of the principle at play here. Because I wonder how that would apply if we gave equal status to all outputs of human labor. For e.g. You need to spend money to buy a macbook, so why link to a review? Or you need to buy a book to read it, so why should comments be able to link to a book? etc etc. OTOH we could simply downvote and move on? :)

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989

I do wish that paywall articles could be tagged as such though.

Maybe if there was a little more encouragement of non-paywalled submissions, where possible?

Here's a Bloomberg article that seems to cover mostly the same ground as this WSJ piece, for example: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-11-22/pilot-str...

Sometimes the WSJ or NYT or whoever just has something to offer that others do not. In many cases, though, it seems like there's other paywall-free reporting that could work basically as well.

Here's the story from another source:

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-air-transport-sr-strike-id...