Get used to working for a corporation, Pulpy boy. Today I was going to write about how the Sun-Sentinel's resident crotchety old man Tom Jicha needs to stick to writing lame TV pieces instead of politics (is there something in the water? Jicha rants about global warming when he should be writing about TV shows, Pat Riley spews about the Iraq War when he should be talking about the Heat, and Joe Rose mouths off about race when he should be talking sports).
But then somebody told me the New Times website was screwed up and they couldn't get on the Pulp. As I told him, bookmark it, make it a favorite, and the bastards can't screw it up (yeah right, give them time). I checked out the NT home page and sure enough it was
gone. Well, not gone but might as well have been. It was lowered on the page, made to look indistinct as hell, and named "The Daily New Times." Under that the most recent posts are linked individually.
First off, motherfuckers, it's called The Daily Pulp, not the The Daily New Times. This is an attempt at branding the newspaper's name. But, like most idiotic decisions made in corporate offices, all it does is take flavor and personality away from the website to make it bland and generic. The juicy orange logo (Florida pulp) is gone, replaced by dull red type. And the way it's set up, people have 90 percent better chance of clicking on individual posts rather than the fucking blog itself.
Blogs are meant to be read as a whole. We know that. They are meant to be explored, clicked all over the place, delved into, wallowed in. And what do the guys in Phoenix do? They slice it up and serve it in cold little bits just so they can make it look like there's a jazillion stories on the site. Hilariously, this is not only a horrific move aeshetically, but it's bad for business, since page views will significantly drop as a result.
I'll try to clear this up, but it's been done company-wide, so it looks bad. I may have gotten some e-mail about this idea being trotted out in another town, but had no idea they were going to destroy overnight what Tony Ortega and I built on the during the past year.
