How's A Blogger To Keep Up With The News?
The Washington Post Redesign Stinks
There's good news and bad about the Washington Post's redesigned Website.
The good news is, more people than ever will start using the Locust Fork World News as their home page and the national online newspaper of record.
The bad news is, it is patently obvious that the programmers and data crunchers are bound and determined to ruin the online newspaper experience and survive on their print editions - or be damned.
Democracy will not be the better for it, but at least the editor's note and some of the blog comments are worth a good Saturday morning laugh.
"One of the most frequent complaints about our previous home page was clutter, specifically the number of links and lack of open space on the page," writes Jim Brady, Executive Editor of WashingtonPost.Com. "In this new page, we've added more white space and cut down the number of long lists of text links. The hope is that these changes give the page more of an open, inviting feel and make it easier to scan.
Editor's Note: About Our New Home Page
One of my favorite reader comments comes from someone in Alexandria, Virginia:
"I use the web page to get content. If I want to see white space, I go to an art gallery. It's hard to find the discussions. Ditch the new homepage..."
Of course they won't, because corporations never go back once they've spent money to change something. So we've taken down the inside section links to the Post on the news page.
A newspaper is something that should be designed to "read," not "scan." I tried to tell the management at the Dallas Morning News this for four years while working for them as the New Orleans bureau. But they would not listen, and ended up in a major advertising/circulation scandal right after I left New Orleans for D.C. in 2004 – a scandal that lost them readers and advertisers and damaged their reputation permanently.
But even new news startups dedicated to doing it right on the Web have had credibility problems of late. Since Politico.Com got the story wrong on the Edwards campaign imploding last week, we won't be linking much to that new enterprise either.
What's a blogger to do to find out what's going on in the world? Long live the Associated Press and MyWay.Com.
Happy weekend reading...