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• Tuesday, October 25, 2005 10:50 AM

  The Pink Bomb

  A couple of days ago, in another forum, I compared Salon's makeover to the strategy of a radio station that had changed ownership and format. Often, when such was the case, the new radio station would broadcast gibberish for several days in order to scrub its old listener base in favor of the new audience they hoped to attract. At the time, I was being ironic.

  Now, after days and days of ever-more-aggressively trivial lead articles, displayed with ever more-cutesy graphics, cumulating in this latest headache-inducing pink monstrosity, I'm beginning to think that getting rid of us is exactly the current editorial strategy.

  And my puzzled dismay has distilled into rage: at the increasingly moronic content, the ill-conceived layout, and the fact that the only editorial response after days of vociferous reader protests has been to diminish actual content still further until all that's left is this current garish pink-festooned self-parody.

  I do not want a women's blog. If I did, I certainly wouldn't want it to be pink and full of smirky, self-congratulatory titles, snippets of gossip and half-evolved thought. I would, as many others have said here, want real coverage of real news of real interest to real women above the age of 12.

  I am not sure what I find most appalling: the apparently wilful destruction of a once respectable, intellectually satisfying web publication, or the apparently escalating attempts to offend loyal readers.

  —smcrae Read smcrae's other letters
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