TechCrunch drops blog format for newspapery look
TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington has said that he wants to displace CNET as the tech industry's top news site. His redesigned home page suggests that TechCrunch won't so much defeat CNET as become CNET. Arrington has replaced the Boing Boingy full-posts-in-reverse-order blog format on TC's home page with much more of a news-site layout. There's a top story with a custom-written "deck," to use newsroom jargon, meant to get you to click through to the whole article. It's similar to the format used by most newspaper sites. Here's a demo of the click-through trick:For contrast, Web editors at Wired.com abandoned decks a year ago, replacing them with a mix of standalone headlines and excerpted blog posts. An explanation at TechCrunch says a main goal was to "reduce load times" for the home page. More effective than reducing the amount of story text, TechCrunch's home page clutter of ads and widgets has been trimmed by about 20 percent, compared to old screenshots. I'm sure clever commenters are already concocting their Valleywag-are-hypocrites posts, but here's what you don't know: We fight over stuff like this all the time. I'm a fan of the all-on-one-page format, for easy sneak-reading at work. Certain sweater-clad people here beg to differ.