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…

The Locust Fork World News

It’s been awhile since I took a big dump on the newspaper industry.

But what the heck. I feel a big one coming on due to a load of crap being offered up today by William Bunch, a senior writer for the Philadelphia Daily News who also publishes a blog.

His latest misinformed missive was the lead story today on the Poynter Institute’s media blog put together by a little guy named Jim Romenesko.

Romenesko: Your daily fix of media industry news, commentary, and memos.

First, here’s some of what this nut job had to say:

I’m a fan of some conspiracy theories. And so really, what could be a more compelling conspiracy theory than the plot to destroy the American newspaper, hatched - in our imagination anyway - by a secret cabal of bloggers and Web gurus meeting in a diner off Calle Ocho in Miami, then launching their assault on circulation from a Grassy Knoll somewhere in cyberspace?

Except this is one conspiracy that can be easily debunked. The American newspaper is being assassinated by “a lone nut.” And we’re going to tell you the name of that lone nut:

Craig Newmark of Craigslist . . . a man whose altruistic vision of running a business to NOT maximize profits is now threatening the livelyhood of thousands of working men and women across this country, your neighbors who work at and publish your local newspaper, jobs that were once supported by the classified ads that have migrated to the most free . . . Craigslist (sic: dot org).

Last week, Newmark’s co-conspirator (OK, he’s not a totally “lone” nut) - his CEO Jim Buckmaster - told stunned Wall Street analysts how they’re happy to forego profits to save you a couple of bucks on a classified ad, and put some of my best friends on the unemployment line in the process. They even leave on the table money in ways that wouldn’t come directly from their customers:

If you won’t charge customers for ads, and apparently you won’t, then at least start accepting those text ads, and funnel those millions of dollars into the newly formed Craig’s Foundation. And what will be the main benefactor of this new foundation? A scholarship fund, to pay for the college education of the dozens of displaced journalists across America losing their jobs everyday. . . . And if there’s any cash left, how about building a retirement home for any newspaper folks who might somehow see a diminished pension down the road?

The “lone nut” theory of the American newspaper assassination

Since no one else will ever set the record straight on this, apparently, perhaps because they have not studied the issue enough to be in command of the facts, let me have a go.

It’s not that much of a mystery to me why newspaper reporters do not understand what’s going on here. Most of them got into newspapering in the first place because they could not do math. And from their early days in the business, they shunned any knowledge of the business side of newspapering, believing that to know the facts about business would jeopardize their objectivity.

But anyone who has ever worked as an academic, teaching journalism, should be familiar with the literature on how newspapers make money to pay reporters. And its not from classified ads or the price of a subscription.

Admittedly, a lot of academics don’t have those facts at their disposal for a variety of reasons. I once got into a heated argument with a faculty member at a reputable regional university who insisted out of ignorance that the Washington Post was a national newspaper, for example. But anyone who knows the facts here, including the publisher and the circulation manager at the Post, knows this to be true: The Post made a conscious decision not to invest in regional printing plants and daily distribution across the country like USA Today, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. It is a metropolitan newspaper with distribution in D.C., Maryland and Virginia.

They now have an opportunity with the Web Press to reach out to a national and international audience, however, and so far they seem to be capitalizing on it - without charging for access to their Web edition.

So let’s be clear. Craigslist.Org is not putting any newspaper reporters out of work because the revenue from classified advertising never, ever went for paying the salaries of reporters in the first place. Nor did the price of a mail subscription or the price of the paper in the newsstand or box on the corner.

The price of the paper itself has always been earmarked primarily for the cost of distributing the newspaper. If anything was left over from that, it went for the cost of printing the newspaper.

Fact: It costs nothing to print or distribute a newspaper on a Web Press. It does cost a little to put it online, but nothing compared to the millions of dollars of paying for and maintaining an offset press, not to mention the rising cost of paper and ink.

Classified ads in newspapers has been a source of revenue for paying staff at newspapers, but mostly for the production and circulation staff. News staffs and most of the employees of newspapers have always been paid from general advertising revenue.

So perhaps Mr. Bunch should redirect his ire at Craigslist toward building a retirement home for newspaper delivery boys and pressmen.

But guess what? There’s an antidote to Craigslist and the newspapers have it in their power to overcome the threat from the competition. If they would just stop bashing the online revolution and join it, they are in a powerful position to take advantage of it. If newspapers would just invest in original journalism and put it online for free, thereby putting themselves in a position of generating a massive amount of traffic AND online advertising revenue, they could survive.

They could even start their own free online classifieds to compete with Craigslit. They could sell Google text ads and pocket all the money and brag at the end of the year to their stockholders.

But apparently, newspaper managers (and columnists) are so out of touch with the reality available right in front of them that they will go on bashing the Web until they are out of business.

When that day comes, us former newspaper reporters who understand the Web Press will be right here to take over where they left off - if there is a First Amendment left after Bush’s appointments to the federal bench get done with sending it to the trash heap of history.

The Audit Bureau of Circulations report released Monday reveals that the circulation at newspapers sank again this spring, with the free-fall at major metro papers continuing dramatically, according to Editor and Publisher magazine.

When will the corporate news heads catch on? Save the trees. Read the news online…

New York Times’ managing editor Jill Abramson defended the newspaper industry the other day and continued the ongoing jihad against blogs, according to the New York Sun.

In her defense of print journalism, she said new technologies do not always replace the old ones and “brand names that carry authority and quality” will continue to flourish.

But not if they continue to alienate long-time readers and allow the quality to slide in the name of the bottom line.

She distinguished the Times from many bloggers, saying, “We believe in a journalism of verification rather than assertion.”

Once again, another elite, highly paid, mainstream New York journalist demonstrates a glaring ignorance of the Internet and a bias against a democratic online environment where the masses can turn for information without having to pay through the nose - and kill millions of trees in the process.

Bloggers were among the critics who first pointed out the flaws in the “verification” of former New York Times correspondent Judith Miller’s reporting about weapons of mass destruction in the run up to war in Iraq, including this blogger and former Times free-lance reporter, who was ignored by the national desk when trying to get the great New York Times to “verify” that there was a secret report that contradicted Miller’s reporting and showed what we now consider conventional wisdom: The Iraq War was planned by the neo-con think tanks before 9/11.

“Call newspapers dinosaurs if you like,” Abramson said. “But remember that dinosaurs walked the earth for millions of years.”

True, but we suspect if dinosaurs had had doctors and critics, it would have been easy to spot when they became so sick that their extinction became predictable and inevitable.

We would love to teach the staff at the Bill Keller New York Times a few Internet tricks that would make their job of verification easier, like how to use Google Alerts to find out when editors say stupid things without having to spend a lot of money and time looking for it. But it is clear they are not interested in the truth anymore.

I once advised the Howell Raines New York Times to take on its critics, but I was talking about the Rush Limbaughs of the world, not Web journalists and commentators who try just as hard to verify information as anyone – and provide links in their stories to prove it.

I woke up Sunday morning thinking about a column on the uproar over the U.S. port debacle. I may very well still get around to exploring that subject after breakfast. But here’s a heads up on something that I’ve been holding off doing for some time and now must deal with.

The Birmingham News today ran an article, a column and a number of photos that have been buried in a closet since the early 1960s dealing with the civil rights movement in “Bomingham.” At least a couple of those photos were taken by photographer Spider Martin, one of my best friends in the world who decided to take himself out of the world almost three years ago on April 8, 2003, on the 30th anniversary of his hero Pablo Picasso’s death.

Due to the self-serving and revisionist nature of the paper’s handling of this issue today, it now becomes imperative that I tell the story I learned about how the news buried the news during the civil rights days. But this will take some time, so check back later to see the result.

In the meantime, you can read the News story on the subject, along with executive editor Tom Scarrett’s weak column on the issue, and view some of the photos on the Newhouse corporate chain Web site. While we are glad the News had finally decided to admit some errors from those days, thanks to the work of an intern, do not be fooled by their balderdash. The News was a racist institution then, and there’s not much evidence it is that much better now. This is PR to try to save the newspaper by boosting circulation with black readers. Nothing more, nothing less…

From Negatives to Positives
Photos Speak Volumes
Photos: Unseen, Unforgotten