How does a reporter get a scoop? Nurturing contacts, wearing out shoe leather, poring over documents. And for some, the toolkit may include phone hacking, honeytraps and covert recording.

I remember hearing once that tabloids like the National Enquirer have some of the most robust fact-checking infrastructures, because the stakes and the likelihood of getting sued are so high. I don’t know how the British libel rules compare to the US, but check out what some of these reporters have done:

The exciting:

In 2003, Daily Mirror reporter Ryan Parry used false references to get a job as a footman in Buckingham Palace. His aim was to uncover security lapses at the Palace in the run-up to President George W Bush’s visit.

He revealed details of the President’s bedroom as well as the Queen’s breakfast habits. Eventually the Queen won a court order preventing the Mirror from revealing any more.

The worrying:

Tessa Mayes, who has worked as an investigative journalist for newspapers and TV shows, said… ‘If I had said no, I wouldn’t have got to work on those stories. It’s not unknown for journalists to sleep with their sources in order to meet a deadline. As it happens I haven’t needed or wanted to do that.’

The silly:

And it is widely claimed that in 1994 Rebekah Wade – then a News of the World reporter, now editor of the Sun – dressed as a cleaner and hid in a toilet for two hours in order to nab an early copy of the Sunday Times.

The Sunday Times, housed in the same building as the News of the World, was serialising a biography of Prince Charles, and NoTW editor Piers Morgan wanted to know what it said. John Witherow, editor of the Sunday Times, is alleged to have shouted at Morgan: ‘Theft isn’t journalism.’

Read the whole thing.

The story, “Threat to Globe triggers flood of feelings” (yes I’ve run into horrible A1 headlines in the Globe before) comes off as narcissistic and self-important.

News that The New York Times Co. might shut down the biggest newspaper in New England if its unions don’t swiftly agree to $20 million in cuts sent a shockwave throughout Greater Boston, sparking an outcry from places as disparate as the Boston Symphony Orchestra and Johnny’s Luncheonette in Newton Centre, and voices as varied as US Senator John F. Kerry and Peter Wolf of the J. Geils Band. To some readers, such a loss seemed unimaginable, but others said the transformation from paper to the Internet is inevitable.

OK, that was rough but not too bad. But hey Globe reporters, what did citizens say to you when you asked them how important they think you are?

Losing the Globe is more than the shuttering of a company, readers said. It would be, they said, the loss of something essential to Massachusetts’ very sense of itself — and one of the few forces for public accountability in the region.

Heaven’s be!

They recalled articles exposing corruption and waste in government and other institutions, and stories giving voice to those who otherwise would have no power at all.

Surely some people disagreed? Yeah, but thankfully they’re idiots.

Critics of the Globe, especially in anonymous comments posted on the newspaper’s website, said the newspaper was falling victim not just to turbulent economic times but what they called its own “liberal bias,” though they did not provide specific examples. Some complained about ink stains; others about perfumed inserts in the newspaper. Still others raised deeper concerns about customer service.

After the jump the story becomes somewhat less exaggerated, with readers giving pretty much every argument for keeping the paper, from “I want a real paper,” to:

“Could you imagine our kids going through life not knowing what a paper is?” said…Suzanne [Locke], who teaches at a Cambridge private school.

I don’t quite understand her argument (without the Globe they wouldn’t know what a paper is?), but here’s the kicker:

Still, the Lockes admitted, they don’t get the paper every day. Mornings are consumed with getting the boys ready for school and rushing off to work, where Steven Locke reads Boston.com, the Globe website.

This one comes right at the end:

Peter Wolf, the front man for the J. Geils Band, said losing the Globe would destroy readers’ connection to the region.

Destroy connection to the region! Can we get a quote on that?

“I can’t say it starts my morning but it starts my afternoon and it’s an old friend,” [Wolf] said. “Unfortunately people don’t get the impact till after it’s done. And when it’s gone, it’s gone for good.”

Oh. Not quite the rending of the flesh I was expecting.

Now, I understand that it’s tough to hear your favorite hometown paper might be going under (especially if you work there). I know that if the Washington Post I’ve been reading for the past eight years were to be threatened, or if word that my childhood paper the Tampa Tribune was closing got out, I’d be disappointed.

But if either then ran a self-indulgent story like this on the front-page the next day, my eyes would roll out of my head. This could have passed as a column. It’s not the kind of thing to be bandying around as journalism when you’re about to go out of business.

I generally think the Globe is a great paper. I love The Big Picture, the Ideas section, and the Reporters’ Questions section of this page down on the right. I would really rather they not go out of business (though going online-only wouldn’t really affect me here in DC). However, they really need to check themselves next time they decide to run a story about how important they are.

****

Misaligned Richter scales: While the Globe reports that news of a possible closure “sent a shockwave throughout Greater Boston, sparking an outcry,” the Boston Herald reports sources saying the “dire message sent a shockwave through a newspaper that has been battered by bad news and decimated by layoffs.”

All the focus on the campaign led to record numbers of viewers/readers for print and television news, with websites seeing some of the largest gains.

Which is to say the larger media outlets loved the election. It got people to read, to watch, to debate and to be involved with their news sources.

Also, though, the election showed the weaknesses of the mainstream media. As they got hooked, news consumers looked first to the large media for their news. There they found slow, tentative coverage with little of the analysis they craved. So they branched out, found political blogs, rumor sites, and even to a greater degree began watching the speeches and debates first hand in order to form their own opinions.

We’ve been told that new media is weakening the old guard, but during this election cycle we saw just how new media would finally break the press.

From early in the primaries, the candidates saw this happening to differing degrees, and responded in kind. From the WSJ:

“This year’s campaign…has marked a change in the role the press plays. The prominence, readership and influence of online political sites has mushroomed, taking away some of the prominence of the mainstream media — traditional television networks, newspapers and news services. Campaigns have taken to getting out word of pending shifts in strategy by leaking them to political websites, and both parties catered to bloggers at their conventions.

“For example, when word first circulated that the McCain campaign was about to launch its first TV ad linking Sen. Obama with former Weathermen radical William Ayers, the Obama campaign promptly told the political website Politico.com…that it intended to counter with an ad calling Sen. McCain ‘erratic in a crisis.’ … [W]ord of the Obama team’s planned countermove was circulating among politicians and journalists before they had even seen the McCain ad that prompted it.”

After years of getting scooped by the Internet, large media outlets now found themselves being routinely scooped in political coverage, a market they were supposed to have cornered. How did this happen? After all, it was the big guys who had the credentials, who were there on the campaign planes flying from stump to stump with the candidates.

In the Internet, candidates saw something hard to control and impossible to predict, but something where the plurality of voices lead to stories rising to the top based on the strength of the message. The candidates also saw a place that, if they hit first and well, might be won over.

Mainstream news outlets began to respond. From Time:

“As politics has expanded to more platforms–blogs, YouTube, comedy shows–the old press has followed, raising its metabolism and sharpening its tone to compete. And following it all has been by turns thrilling and exhausting.

“This is not to say that the souped-up cycle has rendered the election trivial. In a way, just the opposite. This election and its stakes are so significant that people’s appetites are insatiable. They want their voices heard, their issues resolved, their lives bettered.

…

“The traditional press, then, had more competition for scoops, influence and audience as the election became the biggest pop-culture event of the year. So the news media — all chasing the same ad dollars in a bad economy — learned the value of putting on a show. Formerly straitlaced outlets gave themselves an attitude makeover to keep up with the blogs and Comedy Central. CNN hired comic D.L. Hughley to do a late-night show, and even the stodgy Associated Press started injecting bloggy potshots and analysis into its wire stories. If you didn’t snark, you didn’t exist.”

From the Washington Post:

“Just as the Internet is changing newspapers, so it is also changing the AP. In its efforts to survive the tectonic shifts destabilizing most daily newspapers and to brand itself online…the wire service is evolving into the world’s largest virtual newspaper and a direct competitor to the papers that own it.”

Later:

“‘It’s enough that we’re expected to always be first, this incredible pressure to break the news,’ one AP political reporter told me. ‘But now we also have to magically find a brilliant and nifty lead, the unique angle, while still beating everyone else. I feel like I’m competing with Politico, the New York Times and Reuters simultaneously.’ And, indeed, they are.”

The media splintered. Analysis came quicker and reporters found their voices; instead of pretending reporters are robots transcribing events verbatim, we read them knowing they may be wrong (sometimes expecting them to be so). The robot work we’ve passed on to the video streams, the transcripts, we can compare. And in this election many did.

The media became less about trust, and more about depth. It was great.

Was great, as it turned out. TV networks pulled back on election night. For all the streamlining and sharpening they mustered in the months leading up to the election, they pussyfooted at the last second.

The NYT admits:

“It was clear long before 11 p.m. that Mr. Obama had won, but anchors were skittish about saying too much too soon.”

In fact, “Barack Obama’s victory was told tentatively, elliptically, less with numbers than with a pan of the camera as his supporters, crammed into Grant Park in Chicago, exploded with joy. Throughout the night, the obvious was hinted at with gauzy video clips filling the screen. As states toppled in Mr. Obama’s favor, news programs ran lyrical pictures of the Obama family that looked as iconic as a Kennedy scrapbook.”

But they wouldn’t say it. After Ohio came in they wouldn’t just say that Obama was the winner, was pretty much the winner, that it the chances of McCain winning Virginia, Florida, and California (one of the only ways he could have won after that) were between slim and none.

Watching CNN, I remember two anchors coloring in states, showing how many electoral votes McCain would have if he won various remaining states.

“I’m not going to be dishonest and say it’s possible McCain could win California, Washington, or Oregon,” one anchor said, leaving McCain woefully under 270 votes. “So?…” the other anchor led. “Yeah,” he replied.

Obama’s victory was only a formality of tallying votes and closing polls, but no one on the networks would go so far to even say Obama had a pretty good chance of winning at that point.

This pulling back is going to continue. Newspapers will take a break and a deep breath before bemoaning the inevitable decline of print again, and cable news will begin throwing scandal after scandal up on the screen, seeing which kinda sticks before beating it to the ground.

But the next time something captures the culture’s interest and imagination like this election did, those news agencies that took the lessons of the last two years to heart and those that change the way they cater to the journalistic needs of their audience will have the advantage.

The blogs and rumormills and social media sites aren’t going to go away, but the news sources that can provide the most timely analysis, with updates and changes and refinements, they’re the ones that’ll get through this alright.

The way journalism is made changed in this long election cycle, and people loved it. As we pared the candidates to one, they became real people with flaws just like us. Their supporters also became real people, as we saw beyond them as symbols and discovered they had motives, morals, insecurities, and virtues. But best of all, reporters began showing us their sense of humor, their opinions, and at times their fallibility, and they began to become people to.

Let’s keep that going.

David Samuels has a pretty expansive article in this month’s Atlantic where he follows a team of the paparazzi that keep the Britney beat and recounts how modern entertainment news came to be.

While I don’t agree that the paparazzi have become “one of the most powerful and lucrative forces driving the American news-gathering industry,” Samuels points

“…back to March 2002, when a women’s magazine editor named Bonnie Fuller took over a Wenner Media property called Us Weekly, which had drifted along since its founding in 1977 as a rival to the fantastically successful People magazine franchise. What Fuller brought to Us was a keen understanding of her audience. ‘Every day, we’d look at tons of pictures that came in and lay them all out on a conference table,’ Fuller remembers. ‘And what was interesting to me was to look at celebrities going to the dry cleaners and pumping gas. I loved looking at these pictures of celebrities who were just like us.’”

Now celebrity photographers bring in tons of money, but with the focus on celebrities in their normal lives rather than in salacious situations, the paparazzi teams have become larger and more ubiquitous. Also, however, more news agencies have begun buying the pictures. Photo agency X17 rode this trend to the top.

“X17 licenses its pictures to celebrity skin magazines like Us Weekly, People, Life & Style, and In Touch and their associated websites; to celebrity-oriented television programs like Entertainment Tonight, Access Hollywood, Inside Edition, and Extra; as well as to newspapers and magazines in England, Australia, Germany, Japan, Hong Kong, mainland China, Israel, Dubai, and dozens of other countries; to major television news networks like CNN, ABC, NBC, and CBS, and nearly everyone else in the media business who needs pictures and video clips of Paris Hilton’s arrest or Brad and Angelina’s kids or Britney’s latest courtroom drama, which is to say nearly every major news outlet on the planet.”

This has happened in part because exclusives got too expensive:

“The front-of-the-book snapshots in People and Us cost $50,000 to $75,000 per issue, to say nothing of the attention-grabbing exclusive photo-features on Brad and Jen’s divorce or the latest Friends wedding, which averaged in the low-to-mid six figures. When the spending became impossible to sustain, the magazines slashed their photo budgets and stopped buying exclusives. The larger photo agencies like X17 and Bauer-Griffin then found that they could make even more money by selling a single set of pictures 15 or 20 times over, to eight or 10 magazines, five or six television programs, and websites. And so the industrial phase of paparazzi production was born.”

This reminds me of the industrial phase of news production that there’s been some discussion of lately. With local, and even national papers running more and more wire stories, papers are losing their identities. Part of this is because of budget constraints, but also it seems that news has gotten so fast that if you don’t get the story first, it’s not worth getting at all.

TMZ.com editor Harvey Levin has a different opinion, though. From the Atlantic story:

“[TMZ.com] is owned by the giant media conglomerate Time Warner and edited by a pixieish attorney and former TV producer named Harvey Levin. ‘It’s old-fashioned journalism,’ Levin says of the way that celebrity websites gather news. He suggests that the kind of aggressive Web-based coverage that TMZ and other prominent sites have pioneered has obvious applications beyond the world of celebrity, in areas like politics and sports. ‘I see lots of opportunities,’ he says.”

Maybe this divide highlights the difference between photojournalism and reporting. With photos you only get one shot. If you miss it as it happens, you miss the story and you never get a second chance. Writers, however, can go back, find more sources, ask more questions, and get deeper into the story.

The celebrity photojournalism industry has become industrial, with “gangs of immigrant kids with digital cameras purchased on credit from Best Buy [doing] the work of the heroic lone photographers who once lay in wait with telephoto lenses, stalking Jackie O,” according to “traditional Hollywood paparazzi.” But are we ready to have print journalism do the same?

Will our demand for fresh news become so immediate that once an event is over it’s considered old news? I hope not. Having time to reflect before publishing a story can do nothing but improve the story.

Photographers envy writers for the time (however short) they have to polish a story, but now those on the front lines are finding that sometimes you do get a second chance:

“X17’s photographers say that Britney Spears frequently comments on the pictures they post on their website. They also suggest that the pop star sometimes goes out a day or two later and restages unflattering shots. ‘Forever, she has been in on the joke,’ says Harvey Levin of TMZ. ‘She has also been severely mentally ill for a while.’”

The reason, I think, is that blogging is always something I can do tomorrow. Yesterday I played tennis instead of writing, for instance. After the third or fourth day after I’ve found a story I’m usually done with it, or something else has come up that I have to find links for to write about.

This, on the other hand, is a bizarre trainwreck of a column that I read on Sunday in the Post. I put off writing about it, and I’m glad I did.

Mostly because why.i.hate.dc and the DCist did most of my work for me.

The Post, via DCist,

“…ran it to provoke, but not to offend. I thought the parallel she drew
between fainting Obama followers and Beatlemania was an interesting frame
with which to analyze the Obama phenomenon. She went further, of course, to
draw broader conclusions about the state of her gender highlighting women’s
interest in Gray’s Anatomy and Eat, Pray, Love. “

Yeah, that part is the Post’s own Outlook editor, John Pomfret’s, justification of the column. And in case you haven’t read it, here are some quotes I’ve chosen seemingly at random:

“I can’t help it, but reading about such episodes of screaming, gushing and swooning makes me wonder whether women — I should say, ‘we women,’ of course — aren’t the weaker sex after all. ”

or

“Take Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s campaign. By all measures, she has run one of the worst — and, yes, stupidest — presidential races in recent history, marred by every stereotypical flaw of the female sex.”

later

“What is it about us women? Why do we always fall for the hysterical, the superficial and the gooily sentimental?”

Now, if you’re a female columnist (or male for that matter), and you decide you want to write the thoughts you’ve been feeling about how women aren’t as smart as men, could you please not frame it so…insiduously?

I mean, Hillary Clinton’s taken some cheap shots during her run for President, twice as many as either of the guys, and she’s taken it all with some humor. Saying that the problems with her campaign are because it’s being run in a stereotypically feminine is neither provable nor enlightening. In fact, I think it degrades the conversation.

But enough of this Clinton love. The “Second Super Tuesday” caucuses are being counted right now, so it may be curtains for Clinton.

Still, look out for my columns coming up in the Post, first on how Obama’s black campaign keeps making stereotypically black mistakes, second on McCain’s curmudgeonly old man campaign, and how I need to stop letting my dog poop in its yard or I may get the homeowner’s association called on me.

According to the Editor’s Weblog:

A futurist panel at the World Economic Forum has suggested that print newspapers will disappear by 2014. This type of prediction has been repeatedly heard in past years though.

I think that’s pretty soon. I hope newspapers are pretty far along in their progression by then, but I think they’ll still sell the damn things in six years.

In other news, I’ve been watching the development of WiredJournalists.com recently. It’s a social networking site for journalists.

Though it’s gained over 400 members in three days, I’m hesitant to join for a few reasons.

• Firstly, another social network to check?
• Also, I’m no longer a reporter by trade (I’ve moved to other parts of the news industry), and it’s unclear whether the site is for trading ideas on your beat (like ReportingOn) or just a place for people in the news industry to hang out and meet each other.
• Most importantly, none of my friends/colleagues are on it!

These are small reservations, of course, so you’ll probably see me on there by the end of next week.

But! The guys who made this thing, Ryan Sholin, Howard Owens and Zac Echola, all have wonderful blogs. Check them out.

The latest doom-sayer is David Simon, producer for “The Wire” and former newspaperman. From the Washington Post this Sunday:

Isn’t the news itself still valuable to anyone? In any format, through any medium — isn’t an understanding of the events of the day still a salable commodity? Or were we kidding ourselves? Was a newspaper a viable entity only so long as it had classifieds, comics and the latest sports scores?

He points to the shrinking coverage of local papers, the rise of celebrity and soft news, and declining circulations as evidence no one from the newsroom to the news reader cares about news anymore.

Really, though, people are more news-savvy than ever before. Sure, newspapers are going through a tough time, but that’s because their mindset’s all wrong.

Simon admits that “Newsprint itself is an anachronism,” but then suggests that newspapers could have fought the rise of the Internet:

But was there a moment before the deluge of the Internet when news organizations might have better protected themselves and their product? When they might have — as one, industry-wide — declared that their online advertising would be profitable, that their websites would, in fact, charge for providing a rare and worthy service?

The Internet isn’t something newspapers should be fighting, or something they missed their chance to quash. Also, however, a newspaper’s website is not equal to the print edition. A newspaper’s website is the newspaper. The print edition is a luxury. Why doesn’t anyone understand this?

Yes, there are still questions concerning how to monetize the website, but technology will help us there. There are no lack of companies trying to figure out easier and more lucrative ways to get money from web surfers.

I give it 30 years before the New York Times goes web-only. By 2018 the print edition will be a quaint artifact mainly for old people and Luddites, like rotary phones or Polaroid cameras. After all, why buy a paper newspaper when I can just read the paper from my cellphone? Also, aren’t those things made from trees?

P.S.: I hear “The Wire” is awesome, I really want to start watching it.

Here’re the entirety of his remarks, but one passage jumped out to me in particular:

We must tell people what they want to know and — even more important — what they might not want to know, about war, politics, economics, schools, corruption and the thoughts and deeds of those who lead us. We need to tell readers more about Barack Obama and less about Britney Spears. We must give a voice to those who can’t afford a megaphone. And we must become more than a marketing slogan. I know I can rely on this newsroom to do this.

Now, I may have just written on this, but I think O’Shea may be a little off base here.

Firstly, I think people do want to know ” about war, politics, economics, schools, corruption and the thoughts and deeds of those who lead us.” But to say that we need to “tell readers more about Barack Obama and less about Britney Spears” may be disingenuous, I think.

The truth is, I don’t think we can’t have both.

When I say that reporters should think about what the public wants when choosing stories, it doesn’t mean they should choose the easy stories about Britney Spears over probing profiles of psychological heavyweights like Barack Obama. What I’m saying is that we need stories where the psychological aspect is up front. Stories based on press releases and incremental coverage that doesn’t go anywhere won’t cut it.

There are interesting stories buried in many of the easy-skippable articles covering our newsprint now-a-days, but the truth is that with daily deadlines is a lot harder to take the time and find what’s going on beneath a Barack Obama story (generally) than one about our train-wreck friend Ms. Spears.

People flock to the Spears stories because they know that there’ll be something interesting there, we need to find what resonates with the public in every story. Alternatively, cover something else.

To get all up on the O’Shea firing, I suggest starting with the Los Angeles Times‘ story. The New York Times and Reuters have further coverage (and the Wall Street Journal, if you’re a subscriber).

For different takes on the story, Mark Fitzgerald has a good column on the whole thing over at Editor and Publisher, and I enjoyed Howard Owens‘ critique of O’Shea’s comments also.

“Now and for the foreseeable future, virtually everything involving Britney is a big deal,” Frank Baker, the [AP's] Los Angeles assistant bureau chief, wrote on Tuesday morning.

I was talking (arguing) with a friend of mine the other day about the goals of newspapers, and how they decide what is important. He was saying that important news stories were chosen by journalists without considering how interested the general public would be in the story. I said that considering what’s going to be popular, and what’s important to your readers, is a good gauge of what news stories in your area are important.

“Won’t this lead to newspapers being content-wise indistinguishable from supermarket tabloids?” he asked.

“Initially,” I said, “maybe. But I have confidence that popular opinion will swing back, and we’ll find a happy medium. People do care about what’s happening in their towns.”

This NYT article reminded me of that conversation.

In a memo Tuesday, Baker, the AP’s assistant bureau chief for Los Angeles, reminded his reporters that Britney Spears’ ongoing meltdown is news, and they should be covering the newsworthy aspects of it.

…“we want to pay attention to what others are reporting and seek to confirm those stories that WE feel warrant the wire,” [Baker]wrote, adding, “And when we determine that we’ll write something, we must expedite it.”

People want to know what’s happening to Britney, and as LA AP reporters, it their job to report it. And quickly.

I don’t think this is “Not a good day for journalism as a discipline.” as is quoted in the article, but I do think that this is where we need to go if we’re going to have a backlash against insubstantial reporting.

But guess what? The backlash may already be beginning. In a previous post on Gawker, I mentioned that journalists probably like taking the piss out of bloggers who snark about them all day, but after a bunch of Gawker editors quit, there seems to be some well-thought-out misgivings about the blog family’s new direction.

On top of that,a few bloggers from Gawker’s Gizmodo tech blog recently got banned from the largest tech show in the country, the International CES, after some crappy stunt.

It seems like the division between blogger and journalist is re-widening, and people are realizing that newspapers offer something that a lot of these popular blogs to not. At the same time, newspapers are looking at theses blogs as test cases, to see what people are really looking for, and what’s important to people today.

2007 has been a popular year for redesigns, as a handful of newspapers and magazines have updated their online and physical designs. I checked out some of the more recent website redesigns to see if I could glean any ideas.

It’s surprisingly hard to find screengrabs of sites in previous design iterations, so some of my shots may be a little out of date. They serve mostly to give an idea of what the site came from before its present form.

The Los Angeles Times

The LA Times recently updated its site, and it takes on a notably Apple-inspired look, especially in the header. I’m not super excited about the 50% gray background, though. On the article pages and sub pages — pages without the big blue header — the gray is a little overwhelming and makes the page look bland. I do like the contrast between the old-timey LA Times logo and the clean, modern page design.

Grade: B-

The Boston Globe

What I like best about the Globe’s redesign are the changes made to article pages. Check it out, it’s bigger! Bigger fonts, more room for the text, overall much easier to read. In fact, in a lot of these recent redesigns webdesigners have begun defaulting to larger screensizes. No longer is 600×800 the standard anymore, which is strange because I figure if old people (or those who are generally more behind in technological adoption) go to any websites they’d be newspaper sites, so newspapers should be the last to embrace larger screen sizes. The boston.com mainpage has been cleaned up aesthetically as well as made larger. All around I’d say this is a very successful redesign.

Grade: A

ABC News.com

ABC News made a pretty rare decision by choosing a dark color scheme, and I think they pull that off pretty well. Their new site is also an improvement from the tab-addled multimedia onslaught of their former layout, but it still suffers from many of the same problems. There’s little flow on the front page, for instance. It’s just a mess of headlines, and there’s no delineation by importance. Also, I’m not a big fan of having lot’s of movement on a front page, and ABC News’ sliding top stories gets annoying. But what I like least about ABC News’ site are the story pages. Three column article pages are hard to get right and probably shouldn’t be done at all, and ABC News gets them totally wrong by making each column huge, save the one the reader cares about.

Grade: D

Detroit News

I think I’m going to ignore DetNews.com’s red on black color scheme. I dislike it, but it’s a unique choice. What I’m going to focus on here is DetNews’ former eyeblight of a website. It was extremely terrible. They did right by first removing the long and cluttered left menubar. Also I like how the content boxes are clearly defined on the main page. The article pages are nice and big and give the reader the option of — get this! — choosing which font size to use. It’s a good redesign, save the red-black-gray color scheme, which wasn’t implemented very well.

Grade: B+

Now back to designing my own site, I’m thinking electric-yellow on purple?