Here and There

The San Francisco Examiner is still alive and kickin’.

Hard copies can be found in boxes and BART cars all over town, always free-of-charge.

And their website hasn’t missed a beat.

A few weeks ago, the site’s redesign was unveiled, porting it into the early twenty-first century. Here’s what it looked like until then:

Looks and feels a lot like the dead-tree version, much the way a site like www.nytimes.com/ does.

This new iteration of the Examiner online might as well not be associated with the version littering MUNI buses citywide. It looks like a combination blog/generic email forward, with an almost total lack of personality, but easy maneuverability. While they’ve retained the Examiner red in their logo:

…they’ve stripped the site of almost all color (except in ads) and removed all serifs and other typographical decoration.

Yes, much like some other freshly renovated sites, the paper has chosen to tone it down, sacrificing flare for usability.

I have to agree with ess-eff.com that the disappearance of RSS sucks hard.

But I don’t think this redesign of the Examiner makes the site any less attractive in the long run. They still do a better job than their competitors at local news. And they stay on par when it comes to national and international coverage, with feeds from the AP.

It’s unclear what owner Phil Anschutz’s ultimate plans are for the paper. But I applaud its effort to stay competitive in a town dominated by such a failure of a paper (Chronicle). Anschutz’s personal conservative leanings aside, I hope to see the Examiner stick it out, one day rising to the stature of its glory days.

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