Tribune's march towards extinction

The East Valley Tribune has announced that they are cutting back to 4 days a week and are laying off 142 people which represents about 40% of their staff. They are moving to free distribution and pulling out of the Scottsdale and Tempe Markets. So basically, they are now sort of a large version of those driveway throwers like the East Mesa Independent.

Also, a lot of names have been thrown about as to who has been let go. Several of the names that have been sent my direction are fairly shocking including a lot of folks who are well-read throughout the community. I am still trying to confirm, but the fact is they are probably too experienced (expensive) to stay on staff, and will likely be replaced with some cub reporter fresh out of school.

They will still do news 7 days a week online. The quality of what we are going to get is certainly going to suffer. If they are going to move to an online format, they should certainly embrace it and make some changes to their site to ease the transition.

First, they need to clean the site up. They have all sorts of different boxes and tables that are all different sizes and shapes and work differently. I would bet they each take a different kind of feed and programming to display.

Second, pick a couple of ad sizes and go with them. All the different size ads and placements look like we are reading a patchwork quilt. And while we're at it, make sure you have someone looking over the ads for standards. I have seen a ton of blurry and hairly looking ads that look like they we're built in 1995.

Third, fix your comment sections. They take forever to load, they often show up in funky ways and clearly only a few people know how to use them correctly because its always the same four pissed off people commenting on everything.