I have a love-hate relationship with the Journal. I’m old-school enough to need a local newspaper, even in electronic form. I subscribe to much of the Journal’s content through RSS, which usually doesn’t include photos (people might *steal* them!). I can’t get the Sudoku puzzle in RSS, so that, at the very least, leads me to the “ePaper” (worse, the “eEditiion” — barf). Months ago, I discovered that I could use the Mobile URL to get an older form of the epaper which Merri and I both found easier to use (and print) that the fancy version, at that time. Today, my old trick stopped working and this appeared:

Of course, if one doesn’t care about format, just content, then go RSS. As for format, how should the Journal recreate the layout of a paper on a screen? This is a pretty faithful facsimile, albeit impossible to read and surrounded by wasted space and way too many tools.

To read this, one first locates the Page Width menu tool (you see it, right?) and selects Page Width. With that, the largely superfluous tools left and right vanish and one can read about half of a page. To see the bottom half, drag the scroll bar (not the browser’s scroll bar but a skinny little one). Would it kill the programmer to enable Page Down and Page Up buttons? Or continuous scrolling?

Read individual articles by clicking the headline, avoiding the extra tools that pop up over each headline. A small window opens ala AOL (never a positive comparison). Don’t bother to make it bigger because the next one will be small again. Scroll through your article and close that window and proceed.

This strikes me as the kind of thing you show someone who has no idea how other websites or content-apps work. The clueless check-writer eats up the sales pitch and says, that outta satisfy them! Wrong.

Now, the Albuquerque Journal app for Windows 8 is looking more interesting, especially in portrait mode. Recommended. Or try the Albuquerque Journal RSS feed (all articles; you can also subscribe to content areas).