Bye-bye to By-Lines?
I'm boycotting the Globe's online opinions page. The online edition is still not running by-lines on op-eds....
There is no other newspaper online that I know of that doesn't run by-lines on abstracts of their op-eds, and I think the fact that it's so problematic for The Globe at this point in their website redesign is indicative not only of the competence of the design team, but of the downward spiral of the paper itself.
I think The Times, which owns the Globe, wants it to be seen as second-rate. And I think somewhere down the road, in a quest to diversify its holdings, the Times Co., will morph it into a tabloid. And then sell it off to Rupert Murdoch.
Whatever the ultimate game-plan, the paper's current identity crisis is annoying. Because I like to read the editorials and opinions, this latest little cry for help is particularly annoying to me.
The Globe has long run a chastising little blurb about the difference between news, editorials, and op-eds, but the current online edition levels the apparent differences between the latter two.
The Globe is aware of the problem. There was one day last week when the online edition included writers' names in painfully long, clumsy op-ed titles, like "So-and-so writes about the skyrocketing cost of blabideeblah"...
Why is this so agonizingly hard for them? It's not a question of there not being room—there's unlimited vertical space on a webpage. So why can't they just go with the "industry standard"?...
The New York Times:
The Washington Post:
The L.A. Times:
The Chicago Tribune:
The Christian Science Monitor:
I could go on and on and on.
What's disturbing is not so-o-o-o much the tiny inconvenience of clicking on the link to find out who wrote the piece (although all those errant clicks add up), and it's not even the disrespect it shows to columnists and op-ed writers and their audience, which, I suppose is minimal. (You can still click on the regular columnists' link in the sidebar to get to their latest.)
No, what's disturbing to me is that The Globe is having difficulty figuring any of this out in the first place. And the fact that they ran by-lines one day last week, and didn't like the looks of them shows that they are fully aware of this little problem.
I can't figure out if this a principled objection on the part of the editorial staff to disclosing the identities of op-ed authors up-front, or if there is some aesthetic argument raging behind the scenes.
I imagine it's some finicky asshat in the design department who just doesn't like the looks of the word "by." But even if it is a design issue, it still reflects poorly on the editorial team, for whom the electronic edition obviously continues to take a backseat to print. And that's bad business, not to mention a bad bet for the future of print news.
If they did it on purpose, then, yeah, it sucks.
But as a survivor of this sort of massive redesign more times than I care to remember, I'm betting it's that the redesign project was simply far more complex than they expected (some evidence: They didn't roll it out across all pages all at once), and they're still having trouble defining different types of "article" and how to handle them in different cases. That's where the rub lies (or something) when dealing with content-management systems and Web pages and oh, God, just shoot me now.
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I think you're right, Adam. And you would definitely know better than me. I just can't imagine it's that difficult to plug those by-lines in there, and have done with it, already.
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I am all for the Globe adding bylines to the op-eds, but I hope they leave out pictures of the writers. That shot of Broder made me jumpy.
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Shortly after writing this, I noticed the Globe had finally found a way to include by-lines...
It's still a little funny. Not only are the by-lines in tiny, faded print, but in parentheses, too, as if the authors are extrinsic or incidental to the production of the piece. Infinitely better than nothing, though. So, Bravo, Globe! Bravo!
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