Monday, March 04, 2013

Furniture reshuffle at smage.com.au

Fairfax have today launched a new front page on their news sites, to coincide with the move to compact sized newspapers. 

As a reminder of what they had before, here's the front page of the smh.com.au from last week:


And here's the new one from today:


Personally, I think it's disappointing they didn't do something more adventurous. I understand that they wanted to take the sites upmarket and avoid being criticised for being "tabloid" (theage.com.au and smh.com.au have had that accusation thrown at them for years). And I get that they really, really don't want to alienate existing readers. 

But they could have been more, well, interesting. They could have made this project a small statement about Fairfax's digital competency and intent.

Instead it just feels like a missed opportunity.