I like what I've seen so far. I haven't done any serious digging yet, but everything I'm used to seeing here seems to be here, so . . . . The look is clean and crisp and easy on the eyes. Nice job!

Funny story: I read your post without any attention to who wrote it. As the prose got thicker and thicker (and thicker), I'm thinking "Jeeze, I hope this guy's the design geek who did the new site and not some poor schmuck who fancies himself a journalist."

By the 4th or 5th graph, I'm groaning to myself, "OMG, where's the editor?!", when "Steve Contorno, Former managing-editor" scrolled into view.

When I finally stopped laughing, I realized I'd inadvertently discovered the answer to the question "What on earth happened to the DI this year?"

I know that's harsh, and I know there have been some very good editors (and especially managing editors) who couldn't write a simple declarative sentence if their lives depended on it, but most of them could.

The original author, whose relatively simple prose seems too much for Stubear to follow, plainly listed his former title as editor in chief, not managing editor.

If Stubear wants to be the journalistic critic he fancies himself to be, he would be well advised to follow the first of all journalistic principles: Get the facts right. Otherwise he (or she) is just another smarta$$ wannabe.

As for the new site, bravo! It's a bit slow today and there are a few fits and starts to some of the features, but overall it represents an extremely impressive, nigh-on herculean effort to increase the site's utility to a very diverse readership.

How did you implement your newsletters? Did you use Simplenews? Also it looks like there's something wrong with your caching system. Occasionally MySQL errors are showing in the site header. (Like right after I registered to post this comment)

Constant reader, YOU seem to have missed the point. But people without arguments often seize on semantics rather than points.

Stubear's last graf nails the point: Too many people claim they are writers, but they cannot write a sentence. I saw too many of these people when I was in journalism. Some of them were burnouts who would never improve. Some were the non-reading, non-thinking, non-writing, non-editing artistes who had been allowed to foul the newsrooms with their presence and their unbridled idiocy.

To be honest, I'm sort of impressed the DI built this with Drupal. Yes, there are some errors.

I'm troubled, though, because I'm sure this is the same all-visuals, no-content approach that is destroying many newspapers. I already commented on one column that featured numerous factual errors, typos, misspellings, and errors of omission.

Until today's journalists stop fooling themselves and start putting the focus back on content 24/7, not simply with lip service but with action, then the problems will continue.

Newsrooms don't need more artistes, and HTML coders are of limited use. Newsrooms need real journalists who can read, write, and think. And did I mention they don't need more artistes?

P.S.: I use different computers for different things during the day, and it's quite entertaining to read the snarky comment about IE 6 being nearly a decade old. By the way, IE 6 is --

Based on NCSA Mosaic. NCSA Mosaic(TM); was developed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Actually Wenalway, as a point of clarification IE 6 is not based upon NCSA Mosaic, except insofar as in its earliest incarnation, IE was based on code from a company that licensed the Mosaic trademarks but not sourcecode from NCSA. The open-source Firefox browser and other browsers based on the Mozilla project are the real successors of Mosaic through Netscape. IE 6 is only based on Mosaic insofar as all modern browsers borrow certain paradigms from the original. But I digress. I just wanted to point out that the real problem with IE 6 isn't that it's old, but that it fails to support many common web standards, thus vastly increasing the cost and complication of web development through the necessity of supporting it (since it is the default browser of Windows XP, as far as I know the most widely used of all operating systems). This is partly because web standards have continued to develop since the time of IE 6, but is mostly because of Microsoft's general policy of attempting to force market dominance by creating proprietary and incompatible implementations of open standards.

I'm not sure what you mean by artiste (graphic designers?), but while I agree that real, quality journalism is far more important than a flashy website, there is something to be said for readability and accessibility. Other than a few layout elements I would change (light grey structural elements and text could be darker, not very readable on my monitor), I'm currently find this site much more cleanly laid out and accessible than the previous site, which was a mess. Plus, supporting cool FOSS projects like Drupal is always good in my book.

The text I posted about IE 6 comes straight from the About Internet Explorer box. Dispute it if you like.

Also, some focus on readability and accessibility is a good thing. Focusing on those things at the expense of all else is bad, though. Yet that is the path many newspapers have chosen, to their detriment.

I realize it's easier to keep doing the same things, though, and to claim that NOTHING would have done any good, and that newspapers ALWAYS were doomed by the economy or the Internet.

That's why I laugh at people who run around chanting "First Amendment" or whatever other weak excuse they cling to for protecting an industry that destroyed itself. What's more sad is the University continues to give people degrees in an area where they likely will not find steady employment.