Submitted by Shane Wealti on Thu, 2008-02-07 12:49.
They recently did a pretty major redesign and changed their content strategy significantly.
For example, Section A, pretty much the most important news section, which you would hope would be major hard news stories national, state, and local along with the opinion section and weather is 8 pages long today. A majority of the front page is talking about high school students having to take the ACT test...um..ok?? Page 2 is pretty much People Magazine lite with all of your latest celebrity news and a vapid column by Susan Lampert Smith about the prolific amount of snow we have had this year.
Then there's the whole font-diarreah they seem to have. I guess the top story gets a sans-serif font to distinguish it from other top stories on the front page which are inexplicably headlined in a serif-font. In an attempt to emulate the Onion they have adopted a liberal sprinkling of USA Today-style "info-graphics" which are basically trivia tangentially related to whatever story they are placed next to.
They are also trying to be hip and have this new section called ! or bang or whatever which attempts to reach our demographic by using terms such as hipster as much as possible, mentioning Mickey's a lot, and capitalizing things like Downtown Madison.
I've been reading the WSJ just about every day since I was 10 years old and it's really sad to see where they have taken it.
They recently did a pretty
They recently did a pretty major redesign and changed their content strategy significantly.
For example, Section A, pretty much the most important news section, which you would hope would be major hard news stories national, state, and local along with the opinion section and weather is 8 pages long today. A majority of the front page is talking about high school students having to take the ACT test...um..ok?? Page 2 is pretty much People Magazine lite with all of your latest celebrity news and a vapid column by Susan Lampert Smith about the prolific amount of snow we have had this year.
Then there's the whole font-diarreah they seem to have. I guess the top story gets a sans-serif font to distinguish it from other top stories on the front page which are inexplicably headlined in a serif-font. In an attempt to emulate the Onion they have adopted a liberal sprinkling of USA Today-style "info-graphics" which are basically trivia tangentially related to whatever story they are placed next to.
They are also trying to be hip and have this new section called ! or bang or whatever which attempts to reach our demographic by using terms such as hipster as much as possible, mentioning Mickey's a lot, and capitalizing things like Downtown Madison.
I've been reading the WSJ just about every day since I was 10 years old and it's really sad to see where they have taken it.