Bad in So Many Ways

They managed to make the website worse.

Everytime there is a "makeover," it never seems to be for the better. Both TV Guide and Entertainment Weekly made over their magazines so it is difficult to tell the difference between an ad and an article. Even the articles have big headlines, small blocks of big text, and big photos. I'm letting TV Guide run out. Bless The New Yorker for never changing. Still three columns of black text on white, same font, broken up with line art sketches and cartoons after all these years. Why mess with a winning formula.

The T-D doesn't seem to have a formula to even mess with. The website timesdispatch, which is indeed different than inrich.com (and why?) has a big block of wasted space in the middle called the Continuous News Desk which is hard to navigate. It scrolls horizontal, when most Internet users are accustomed to vertical scrolling. Inrich is even more ablaze with flashing, popping, moving ads, even some that peel down over what you're trying to read. The inrich site is cleaner, but the "breaking news" seems to be "any news," just a list of stuff. I clicked on one thing that looked like an obituary, but might have been the bio for an Obama-appointee. There was no explanation. When I went back, the page had changed all around and I had no idea where I was anymore, even though I was back on the homepage.

This is marketing desperation to make money, with presentation of the news only a marginal vehicle. I'm sure if the marketing department comes back with the proposition that only stories about catz haz cheezeburgers should be on the page, that will happen. Reporting the news rides way in the back of this bus.

Did newspapers always have marketing departments? Did they need them?