Today's NYTimes sports front

» timesfront JIMROMENESKO.COM

Gimmicky and dumb.

My first thought was a production error that kept the other elements off the page.

Thoughts?

 

Odd. Looks unfinished and, quite frankly, unprofessional.

 

Again? #yawn

 

No shit, MS.

Damn, somebody needs to tell them that well is dry, so they need to stop going to it.

 

They've gone there before. Having read the story - which is quite powerful in its own right - I think it was terribly underserved by that design.

 

You're right, HH. It deserved more than to be thrown onto the page. That's embarrassing.

Arrogant design. Maybe think of the readers -- and the content -- next time and put the vanity aside.

 

Reminds me of the time one of our photographers turned in a picture with all sorts of trippy motion blur as an "artistic" picture.
It wasn't. It was a crappy, out of focus picture that might have seemed like a cool idea but actually would have looked like stir-fried ass when put upon a page.
Same with this.
I'm sure this is a good read, but to treat what looks to be a short 20-inch story like that it better either win a pulitzer or have the empty space be for collecting tears when you're through with it.
But what do I know? I work in Podunk, not New York.

Didn't the NYT do this just last year, as well, with an A-Rod story or something? I think someone said then that you can do this about once a decade. It has not been even close to a decade.

 

Did it with the A-Rod story and did it with the Hall of Fame election a few years back, too.

 

It would make me want to read the story to see if it was some kind of screwup or if there was some reason it needed such an underwhelming layout.

 

Funny, my reaction was exactly the opposite. No way I was reading the story just because of the layout.

 

What a joke.

 

I honestly think it works great. Probably the only people who'd bitch about it are folks in the industry. Even if it's used once a year, that's still only once out of 365 days (check my math). Is that really going to the well that often? Granted, it looks like a mistake at first, but so did the ending of the Sopranos

/hated the ending of the Sopranos.