I just went to the NYT website a few moments ago, for the first time in several days. And lo, there’s a totally new design going on! It’s weird, but the first thing I thought upon seeing it was, “Whoah! It looks like…a blog.” I think this might mostly have to do with the font change, as well as the fact that all the text is no longer in black ink. Perhaps more than a blog per se, it just looks now like a website to me, rather than a newspaper’s website. I’m not sure what I’m getting at here exactly, but it’s something about genre’s relationship to design and how it makes you feel about the content you’re reading, or the source from which it’s coming.
April 4, 2006
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For me, what sprang to mind was not so much “blog” as “dog’s breakfast.” The code isn’t valid, and the way it renders in my browser, there’s a big blank space in the middle of the page, and some of the text lower down overlaps other text and pictures. It’s an unsightly, unworkable mess.
Comment by Q. Pheevr — April 4, 2006 @ 2:51 pm
I still read CNN.com in addition to the websites for the Washington Post, the NY Times, and the BBC, because — despite the fact that CNN is far more conservatively biased and superficial than those other three — they’re still the only ones who understand how to present the content of news in the format of a website.
The new Times site is an improvement, but it’s still got a long way to go. Then again, the CNN site is getting worse. So maybe they’ll eventually average out into something only mildly unreadable.
Comment by james — April 4, 2006 @ 6:24 pm