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August 05, 2005
"They Will Never Let Me Do This Critique Again"
The Washington Post has started the oh-god-here-we-go-with-everybody-having-a-frigging-say process of letting all the underlings take a stab at internal memos criticizing the product. (Somehow I don't doubt that they refer to their paper as "the product.") But then Style writer Hank Stuever has his turn, and manages to sink 30 years of polling and tweaking with six paragraphs of logic.
I have worked at newspapers that fretted, angsted and test-marketed all sorts of "news you can use" and entry points and time-savers. We added geegaws, rails, skyboxes, refers, breakouts, sidebars; we set the articles in ragged-right and whacked the living shit out of them. It helped not one bit, but this identity crisis ultimately created a paper you really could read in 10 minutes. And soon enough, it started to feel like something that wasn't worth the 50 cents they charge for it.
Amen. Let there be longer articles, text-oriented design, and let the morons go buy Reader's Digest or something.
****
Also, so there's, like, this new planet.
| By mesh | 07:23 PM
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