Paywalls, as everyone knows, are going to save journalism. The Toronto Star recently announced that it will erect a paywall around its online content soon, following in the footsteps of PostMedia and the Globe and Mail, which finally enacted its 10-article limit about a month ago. At some point in 2013, all of Canada’s biggest newspapers will have paywalls.

The problem with paywalls, of course, is that they don’t work very well. Sure, you might get some extra subscriptions to your website, but you are also driving away many other readers who can find similar news reports elsewhere. And the ones that do stay? Well, you’re just penalizing them for their loyalty.

Canadian computer ninja David Hayes had already made a bookmarklet for getting around the New York Times paywall, and now he has one for the Globe and Mail too. Simply drag it to your bookmarks bar and click it whenever you see Gandalf. It clears your cookies and resets you to 0 articles read.

The Globe’s paywall also doesn’t count social media and search engine links toward your 10-article limit. So if you don’t want to bother with the bookmarklet, just throw the first paragraph of the article into Google and click through again. If you have Twitter or Facebook open, you can also scroll through the Globe’s feed and click on the article you want to read.

Of course, 99¢ isn’t an outrageous price for access to the entire site, but the industry-wide push to wall things off is short-sighted at best and ignores other possibilities for making money and creating a community of readers. Just because it seems to have worked for the New York Times doesn’t mean it’s the magic bullet to save the news business. There’s still plenty of experimenting that can take place and numerous models could prove successful.