* Yale Daily News Penis Removed by Digital Software Sword

September 7, 2010
Letter to the Editor
Yale Daily News

Dear Editor:

 OK I admit I was wrong. The damn new posting board IS BETTER than the old one. Why am I so resistant to change?

 Paul Keane

PS I still hate the little Monopoly men.
_____________________________________________________


 Letter to the Editor
The Yale Daily News
(for publication)

I was delighted to read in the email edition of YDN today that the Daily News had renovated its 19th Century building, which I have long admired as a native of New Haven.

I posted a comment on that article this evening of 9/2/10, and an hour later the article was removed from the YDN digital edition. I won't even speculate on the possible reasons why it has mysteriously disappeared from the YDN digital edition this evening, where it had been all day.

Here is the substance of what I said: The Daily News may have done a fine job in renovating its edifice and making it shine, but it has done a poor job in renovating the YDN website, which is rather washed out, if not downright dull in its new digital incarnation.

The posting board, which used to permit signing-in with a caption which had a zing to it, has abolished that feature entirely.

This amounts to creating a newspaper without headlines, an inexplicable act of journalistic self-mutilation, apparently dictated by the new website's softwear, which also accompanies every post with a genderless, shapeless shadow-cameo icon similar to a plastic Monopoly piece (all made of ticky-tacky?) standing rigidly at attention like obedient soldiers on the left-hand margin of the posting page, forming a stack of soldier-icons standing one on top of the other from the top to bottom of the posting page. Zeig heil!

In addition, the mandatory sign-up for posting rights automatically places one's user-name uniformly at the end of every post much like the ingredients in a Hershey Bar and with about as much impact.

The result is a cookie-cutter, standardized, visually monotonous, graphic hypnosis: exactly the opposite of what journalism schools preach about laying out a page to attract the viewer's eye with graphic variety and peppery, pithy headlines, catch-phrases and designs.

Intended or unintended, the result is a POSTING BOARD WITHOUT HEADLINES which puts the eye of the viewer to sleep.

Nice job of journalistic self-castration YDN!
What a pity.

What ever were you thinking?

Paul Keane
M. Div. '80

PS
Like all institutions (especially those run by males) I am sure you are incapable of admitting you have made a MISTAKE, especially after you have signed the check for X -years contract with a software company. I will bet my shoes you will even find a way to brag that this monotonous digital nightmare contraption of a posting board is actually an improvement. So much for institutional self-adoration.