CSotD: Bad memory, false rumor, scary realities
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The New Adventures of Queen Victoria sent me on a bum trip down memory lane this morning, not only based on my own bad memory but on a rumor that seems to have been incomplete.
The rumor was that the Houston Chronicle was going through a design change that would put an end to its "build your own comics page" feature. This turned out to not be the case: According to the Chron, the redesign will wipe out existing pages and you'll have to go back and do them over again, but the feature will be restored once they work out how to set it up within the new design.
At the moment, the link for building your own page no longer appears on the site, but it's still there and it still works, though this might not be the best time to build a page, if you're just going to have to do it over again anyway.
So that was the false rumor, and part of the memory was a conversation I had with a syndicate head back in about 2000, when the San Jose Mercury News, the Philly News and the Chron were the only places where you could build your own comics page.
This was before the syndicates launched their own similar services and I was told that licensing those three sites had been a mistake made in the early days and would not be repeated.
Setting yourself up on those pages was the handiest way to see the comics that weren't in your local paper. The alternative — unless you knew how to program and could create your own application for snagging them each day — was hunting them down one at a time, an unpleasant task in the days of dialup.
And, since each of the three papers had a slightly different selection, the trick was to build a page at each, call them up and then go make coffee while they loaded. Maybe take a shower and shave, too. But there they were.
Philly was first to fold the service, but the paper was in an overall tailspin anyway and had apparently assigned the comics to a chimpanzee, since it was not unusual for the page to stop updating for a few days, or for the chimp to forget to change the year on a comic link, so that you would suddenly be reading the one from this month, this day, but a year ago. Rex Morgan is hard enough to follow without suddenly having characters from three arcs ago step into the story again.
There was always the thought that, if they would simply hire someone competent, they could get some good value out of the feature, but I don't think that thought ever amounted to an actual "hope," and the death of the Philly page was not greatly mourned except as a wasted opportunity on their part.
And now we come to the spot where my faulty memory comes into play.
The idea of Edgar Allen Poe launching an archive of GeoCities sites is, indeed, as frightening as anything he wrote in real life. It is also not an entirely imaginary concept.
In the words of Count Floyd, "Scary! Scary!"
But even scarier is that I was thinking of "Real Cities," the corporate abomination that destroyed the San Jose Mercury News comics feature as part of Knight Ridder's death wish. "Real Cities" was a brilliant plan to make all the Knight Ridder web sites, and several allied web sites, look exactly the same, including having the same lead stories and basically scrubbing mention of the actual city into whose slow-loading un-navigable homogenized hell you had wandered.
GeoCities (and Angelfire and some other early web hosts) definitely hosted some ugly-ass pages — yellow background with red lettering was not unusual in the olden days, as well as midi files that played bad music you couldn't shut off except by muting your own system.
But RealCities was a job killer. It didn't just mean that local papers were laying off their own web people because the corporate page did most of the work. It helped kill traffic, too, which hastened the spiral newspapers were already in. These ugly, dysfunctional sites went against so many basic principles of journalism, marketing, web design and good sense that it's hard to believe the idea got out of its first meeting.
It did, and here's the only positive I can find: I have often railed and ranted and frothed at the mouth over the self-destructive idiocy at the head of the industry and I probably come across as a bit of a crank. But here's something from the time capsule to show what I mean:
This chipper, uncritical 2002 article with the "I can't make this stuff up" headline "Who Needs a Pretty Website Anyway? Knight Ridder Digital CEO Hilary Schneider inherited a business that critics hate and bean counters love," explains the brilliance behind infuriating readers in order to please advertisers.
Three years later, Knight Ridder announced its intentions to fold its tent and disappear, which it did, generating probably the loudest thud of all the thuds in the industry.
See? I'm not delusional. The industry really was being run by idiots, with the cheerful support of business writers who were equally reluctant to admit that they couldn't see the Emperor's New Clothes.
I am vindicated!
Except, y'know, for the part where I build a blog posting by cobbling together a false rumor with a mis-remembered web name.
Well, it was scary anyway. Very scary. How scary? This scary:
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