Salon.com's Redesign Sucks

I've noticed I've been reading salon.com less and less frequently over the past few months. I trace the change to their much-vaunted (and expensive) re-design, one that looks oddly similar to The Onion's new look, with a big image at the top and as many little squares containing story links and blurbs crammed around it as they can fit.

In Salon's case, however, it's not so much the design (though the small-as-hell print is very irritating, there's no space constraint on the web, people.) but rather the shrinking amount of real content being stretched more thinly across the various headline sections. Each of the regular segments, like the music section and the women's-focused clippings section appear at least twice in the main area of the page, with the headline and / or section name and blurb worded differently enough that you have to read halfway through to see that it's a double sometimes.

Also I'm noticing far less original reporting and more glorified second-hand blogging. The regular columnists are taking a more prominent positions writing the equivalent of a page a day answering reader e-mails and just writing in spiels.

It's becoming more and more rare for a reporter to write an account of even leaving the building or making a phone call to check something out, let alone a piece of real honest-to-God reporting.

They've also had this rather tasteless tendency to sound like PBS in their begging you to buy a paid subscription, sounding like a non-profit when they are in reality no such thing.

Even a couple of years back when they inexplicably hired a couple of right-wing nutbags like David Horowitz to write columns, at least it was a misstep that gave me something to read. Now it's just a slick-looking load of recycled content and five cent opinion pieces that the ghost of netscape.com probably beats in terms of original writing.

That said, Slate still hasn't come to be any better, even by default, and has no coherent voice to speak of. And even though it's no longer a part of Microsoft, it still bears the stink of being headed by a company that had no instincts in the publishing business. Tom Tomorrow wrote about his experience being treated like just another prospective external vendor in this post from 2004, and I haven't read about any substantive shift in their corporate culture since.

The problem, as I see it, with both of those sites is their attempts to produce a new 'edition' every day with the budget of a weekly news magazine. It's just not going to produce good results when all of your writers are on the hook for a column every day, which saps their effort and ambition away from pursuing other stories.

They are also at the disadvantage of not getting the easy content that the print publications have access to from a presumably already-working business model that they can just copy to the web. A site like The Nation can chug along happily as a companion to a magazine that has been doing its thing for 150 years, and doesn't have to bow to the pressure to make the advertising more and more gaudy and intrusive.

Salon is run by people who wanted to be running a media company from the get-go, which means they bought office space in New York City and furnished and staffed it to match the publications they had come from, because that was their natural environment. The founders of Daily Kos and Eschaton, by contrast, started out writing because they had something to say, and their success was purely driven by the worthiness of the content, rather than being first-to-market with online news and political opinion content, no matter what it was.

I'm starting to sound a note of blogger triumphalism, forgive me while I go shower. There. OK, so basically salon makes me angry because they cover their lack of real content with slick (and IMO less-usable) web design, and don't have the generosity to clearly indicate to their readers that a given link isn't as important as a feature story.

If the writers at Daily Kos started to annoy their readers with such a practice of disguising lackluster content to get clicks the readers would let them know in the comments, and it wouldn't last very long, but at a site like Salon where feedback can be tightly controlled on their own site the marketing people will prevail. And that's what is making me not read them.
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