New look for The Age
One of my morning rituals is to scan headlines of The Age online. It was a pleasant surprise today to see the new look; very clean and impressive.
I don’t like the fact they’re moving towards registration of users though. It started with the rugby and AFL sections, where they only let you read one story before requiring login, and I suspect the cancer will spread across the whole site.
I know from experience that commercial media worry about the Internet and can’t work out how to make money from it. I thought Fairfax and News Ltd reached a good compromise when they made their daily content free, but started charging for archived articles.
There are so many good sources of free news online that I couldn’t be bothered logging in.
An interesting aspect of The Age’s new look is their use of san-serif fonts. The printed newspaper has always used the classic Times serif fonts, and so had the online version until today.
In explaining the site changes, The Age makes no mention of this fact. I suspect it was a controversial issue in house. Editors, sub-editors, journalists and production people all have strong opinions on matters like this.
I'm a 41-year-old father of four working as a newspaper editor at Mount Gambier in South Australia.
