The Globe's new look on-line (they have made some radical changes in the past weeks and months in the look and feel of their front page in print, too) is all well and good, but is coming together all herky-jerky, in fits and starts. 

I certainly don't object in the least to a new look.  The old Boston.com and the Globe's pages had a busy, fussy, ungenerous feel, for me.  It felt boxed-in, like a small apartment with too much furniture and lots and lots of tchotchkes littering every surface of it. 

It may be that in the internet age, a new look every couple of years is necessary to keep a site feeling fresh.  For newspapers it's even more important to be in tune with what works and doesn't work on their sites, and to be able to adjust themselves accordingly.  And it's undeniably hard to get all the information you want out there in a way that's easy and inviting to access. 

This is a whole new game for newspapers.  Remember the tremors that went through the newspaper-reading world when The Gray Lady became a Lady of Color? 

One critic wrote: "The last thing I want from my newspaper is flash and in-my-face friendliness. I don't want my paper in color any more than I want my mother in a miniskirt or my president on MTV. It's embarrassing, and it looks like hell. Besides, I don't want to live in a city where the old riddle, 'What's black and white and red all over?' no longer makes sense. It's just not proper, and almost everybody I spoke to feels the same way."

That was only ten years ago, by the way.

The Old Gray Lady's had a lot more nips and tucks since then, and she looks better these days than Nancy Pelosi in Armani.  To see how the times have changed, you need only look at the Times online.  They're now running this ad for home delivery on their site:


Why is this man smiling? What kind of idiot reads the morning paper for a laugh?  But this is apparently what the Times wants you to think will happen when you open to page A6 and read the latest on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Everything from the blatant mid-life metrosexualism of the foofy hair and the shale green mock turtleneck, to the paper itself, which appears to be made of gossamer and features a front-page photo of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, screams... frankly I don't know what it screams, but it screams.

The Globe's not quite there yet.  In fact, it's got a long way to go before I'll go to the trouble of donning a shale green mock turtleneck to read it.  At least in public.

I do have one massive beef with the Globe online, though.  I can't imagine any reason why the abstracts of op-eds with links to the articles don't have any by-lines.  Are we supposed to guess who wrote each one, or just read them all, regardless of who wrote them? 

Personally, I like to know if Jeff Jacoby is lurking around the corner, a click away, ready to pounce.  Is that really too much to ask?