Misprint

These two news stories turn out to be more alike than one would expect from their headlines.

Mainly because the text in each case is the same. The story about whether Democrats are at risk of losing the Gubernatorial race in New Jersey is completely absent from the page; its text is the copy about the Noble Peace Prize. Given that this is part of yesterday's Evening Review, it seems that this error has been up at least all night, supposedly without anyone at The Week noticing and having it fixed.

This is how news outlets die; their staffs become so small that there aren't enough people to make sure that major items, like having stories match the headlines that lead them, are done properly. Maybe the editor overseeing the page was overworked and just sort of glazed over it. Maybe there was a problem in the software that translated the stories to the final production page. Maybe the job was outsourced to a generative automation system, the capabilities of which were overestimated. I have no idea. I just know that this isn't the first time I've noticed something glaringly wrong with The Week's website recently.

I'm not sure what the solution to this is. A lot of advertising-supported news sites are suffering from low advertising rates, driven by the fact that the number of places available to place ads dwarfs the number of high and middle-quality advertisers out there. YouTube has gone to war with ad-blockers, and the site users who employ them, in a bid to demonstrate greater reach to advertisers, and thus justify higher rates. But it's not at all clear that Alphabet has managed to force everyone to either watch the advertising that YouTube presents or pay for a subscription. It's also not clear that the advertising is any better that it had been before. Having a video interrupted mid-word for a poor-quality ad, or one that's almost certainly fraudulent, is a poor user experience, and it's understandable that people feel that having to pay to avoid them is somewhat extortionate.

The Week could implement a subscription wall, either free or paid, but I don't know if that really solves the problem, either, as readership would certainly decline. Axios tends to gate stories behind a free subscription to the website, but it's really clear that signing up is going to lead to a lot of new inbox traffic, a hassle that people might not want to deal with.

Given that The Week tends to offer roundups of other coverage of the stories presented, tracking down information on the Democratic Party's woes in New Jersey shouldn't be difficult. But that's kind of the point of The Week, it tracks these things down, so that readers don't have to. If the problems with the website are indicative of big enough problems that the outlet is at risk of becoming non-viable, readers could lose a useful piece of the overall news landscape.