NP: Franz Ferdinand, Franz Ferdinand

The first shoe seems to have dropped as a result of the Washington Post buying Slate, and it stinks.

As of today, e-mailed stories no longer contain the full story, but rather require users to click on a link to read the balance of the articles on the web site, where they can be further bombarded with advertising.

Aside from yanking away a particularly nice feature of the newsletters, particularly the meta-news Today's Papers feature, clicking the link brings you back to the top of the article, rather than the middle, which is ostensibly where you were when you jumped to the website. The link shouldn't read "to continue reading, click on the link," but rather, "to start reading again from the beginning, click on the link."

So, not only have they disrupted and devalued the user experience in principle, they've executed it badly so as to double the negative effect. I can't believe I'm going to say this, but I miss Microsoft.