I'm reading newspapers again

By Roger Ebert

Of course I've never stopped reading the Sun-Times. That's the start of my daily ritual. But while I used to read four newspapers every day, I found that, gradually, I wasn't. You know how it is. You get mired in the matrix of the web and think you're reading all the news you can handle. You have the papers, but they're unopened at the end of the day.

However, during the election season and the Inauguration euphoria, I renewed our subscription to the New York Times and remembered, at first almost unconsciously, how much I enjoy reading a newspaper. The pages follow in orderly progression. The headlines and artwork point me to stories I find interesting. I am settled. I am serene. I read, I think. I am freed from clicking and the hectic need to scroll, to bounce between links. I don't have search for the print stories. They find me.

This morning, I went to Huffington Post and realized it had become too slow for me. Perhaps as a strategy to generate more clicks and longer visit times, they make it tricky to get to the god-damned stories themselves. I was intrigued by the screaming top-page headline: "Generals on Obama's Iraq Decision." I clicked on it. No story, of course, but I found myself on the Politics page, where I found the same screaming headline at the top, then a photo (the same one from the top page), and then a headline under that photo. I clicked on that head, the same technique I had used on the page that brought me here. This time that took me to a story about top-level secret talks. Nothing about the generals. I backed up a page. Scrolled down. No generals anywhere below. Only now, while writing these words, did I realize that I should have clicked on the top headline on the Politics page, which had not changed , although now it linked to an actual story.

I guess I was a dummy. But I've had similar adventures on HuffPost many times. You click to a page, and then try to solve the mystery of where your desired story is on that page. Would it have been too much trouble for the original click to lead me directly to the promised story? No, but this way they got three times as many "page visits."

http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2009/02/im_reading_newspapers_again.html