Andy Rutledge wrote a sweeping piece deservedly condemning the current design approach to " digital news" and its business model. Here's a glimpse of his point:
Quality news requires quality presentation, free from the ridiculous array of experience-destroying marketing. Payment for the PRODUCT allows for this to happen. Experience-destroying penalties for getting the product for free create a broken system while at the same time destroying the value proposition for payment.
Though I find empirical evidence lacking for his suggestion that the model is purely subscription driven, I do hear what he's saying. I also believe that the current state of news design sucks horribly. Even the big boys look crappy. But simply suggesting that paywalls should be erected and the sites need to be clean and virtually ad-free sounds really good to me, but isn't a business reality right now — even though the news industry has nobody to blame but itself for getting into this "free news for all" predicament.
Nevertheless, Andy's redux site example for nytimes.com is pretty awesome.
