Today is pet peeve day. Keep in mind that a pet peeve is something that (a) bugs me but (b) the rest of you don’t care about, and (c) I have to gripe about anyway. So here it is:
On the left is today’s print edition of the LA Times, which showed up on my driveway around 5 am. It has five stories. On the right is the online front page of the LA Times at about 10 am. It has nine stories, none of which are the ones in the print edition.¹
What’s the deal with this? It happens nearly every day. You’d think that if a story is important enough for the editors to put it on the front page of the print edition, it would be important enough to show up somewhere on the front page of the online edition a mere few hours later. But no.
Like I said, all of you are just shrugging about this and wondering what’s eating me. All I can say is that it sure makes it hard to link to stories I read in the print edition. They frequently aren’t anywhere on the front page, even if you scroll down forever. So then I try to figure out which section it might be in. Business? Local? Nation? Politics? Sometimes that works, sometimes it doesn’t. Frequently it turns out that the story ran two or three or even five days ago online. Then I try to search for it, but stories often don’t show up in a search, for reasons that baffle me.
In addition to fixing their search funtion and syncing up the print and online publishing dates, maybe they could at least include a “Today’s Front Page” box in the online edition? That wouldn’t be so hard, would it?
¹The “Golden State killer” story in the online edition is different from the one in the print edition. But if you want to count that one, that’s fine. They’re now 1 for 5 instead of 0 for 5.
