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The Lumiere Place-Dispatch

Visitors to the web analogue of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch had best put their Ray-Bans on first, lest their retinas be scorched by the garish Lumiere Place advertising that serves as wallpaper today:

Subtle!

The P-D must have decided it could make additional cash by renting out the space formerly occupied by its non-revenue-producing (and fairly unattractive) original background imagery:

An improvement? Sure, if it’s money that matters, which seems to be the subtext here. While it’s likely that the wallpaper will disappear once we get past this opening day for the new Laclede’s Landing casino, it’s possible that this is just the start of a new and visually intrusive ad arrangement at the website.

This development becomes more interesting in light of the recent change made to the layout of the forums at STLtoday.com. The number of topics displayed on a given forum page has been reduced to a measly eight. The intent behind the change was announced - in response to irate comments in the forums - by Bob Rose, deputy managing editor for online and presentation:

Those who have called us out on this as a way to increase page views are right on the money. That was our immediate goal.

Page views are one of the ways we pay our freight around here. We don’t charge you a subscription, but we want to continually invest more and more into stltoday.

That this is a frankly artificial way of inflating page views - forcing readers to click more often and spend more time hunting for topics - is so obvious that it’s almost not worth mentioning, but it’s no less insulting for all that. The casual mention of the option of going to subscription mode shouldn’t go unremarked: that ship has sailed. The New York Times has dropped its TimesSelect subscription wall, and even that bastion of capitalism, the Wall Street Journal, is headed for free access online. If those publications can’t make people pay online for their product, then subscriptions are hardly a realistic option for the P-D, and it’s…unhelpful, let’s say…to even bring it up as a possibility.

Times are tough for newspapers, without a doubt. Their websites will naturally undergo evolution as publishers try to maximize profits and attract readership, but the kinds of changes we’re seeing at STLtoday.com - which already suffers from a crowded, clunky design - don’t help. One can only wonder what other changes are in store for a newspaper website that is already a less than inviting experience for readers.

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