New Chron Online ... again

Chron.com 3.0? I still hate the ads, but there doesn't seem to be much of a way around that these day.

As was the case for the last major overhaul, the internal pages don't seem to be affected yet. Hopefully, that's a matter of time. My own gripes about the 2.0 setup (for lack of a better term - it lumps a lot of iterations under 1.0) are that the story pages take too long to load up and that the section pages are a bit too clunky.

The former seems to be related to the comments feature. I don't claim to be a fan of super-long comment threads, so maybe I'm just showing my bias in declaring it not worth the hassle. I mean, having a means to deselect the option of seeing comments on my user profile would be a nice option. An odd one, perhaps ... but a nice one nonetheless.

The latter has some exceptions (Sports always struck me better than the others) and you get used to it. So the complaint is relatively minor. And given my own newsjunkie need for having massive lists of links to lots and lots of stories, it's clear to me that any fix may be met with a lot of moaning and groaning from this reader.

That last item of interest is sorta what has me a bit optimistic about the new frontpage redo. Lots of links and lots of scroll. Yay me! But what's up with having a "Highlight" underneath the main story you're plugging? Is it really a highlight if it's not at the top of the page?

"Your Stories & Photos" ... ironic as it may seem, this webjunkie hasn't been overly impressed with the concept of user-generated content. As a concept, it may have it's time. I'm not overly convinced it's here. Until you get some reads in there that rival some of the reporters - and I mean hard news stuff, not the fluffy bunny stories/columns - then we can talk and/or justify the high placement of this feature.

Video ... for me, I'd honestly like to see this given more prominence. I think the Chron's done a decent-to-good job of incorporating video into their stories. Now if they can just train John McClain to wear matching clothes from time to time ....

And what the heck is News Bizarre doing at the top of the news listings? That's just ... um ... bizarre.

UPDATE: It seems the Tennessean (we all read that on a daily basis, right?) also got a facelift. Organizationally, I think it's a mess. But the color scheme is a nice change of pace from the March of White that seems to be enveloping so many newspaper websites. Maybe if they made the news sections larger and moved them up to ... say, the top third of the page ... I'd like it more.