The Ruinous Sameness of Kinja and Medium Websites

Earlier this year, Univision announced that the Onion, A.V. Club, and Clickhole would be moving to the Kinja CMS that they acquired along with Gizmodo Media Group. The Root also migrated to Kinja, as was Fusion, rebranded as Splinter. Today, the A.V. Club launched their new Kinja site.

This reminds me a little of the mass migration to Medium of a few notable publications last year. Kinja and Medium each have such uniquely-branded platforms that it makes it very difficult for me to remember which website I saw an article on — Gizmodo or Jezebel, Monday Note or any old Medium account. They all just sort of blur together on their respective platforms. That’s not to say the websites are ugly, per se, but they are generic, drab, and unidentifiable.

Change is afoot on the Medium side of things. Earlier this year, Film School Rejects and Pacific Standard moved away from the platform; this month, the Awl announced that they went back to WordPress with their old custom theme. The Ringer and Backchannel also left Medium. Once again, I can tell those sites apart from each other.

All of this is to say that I hope Clickhole and the Onion don’t look like Deadspin when they launch on Kinja. They’re very different websites, and their design should articulate that. I think the Onion would be markedly less funny if it didn’t look like a hard news website, and giving it the generic Kinja treatment would be a bleak milestone for one of the most consistently brilliant places on the web.

The Village Voice’s Print Edition Bites the Dust ⇥ poynter.org

Benjamin Mullin, Poynter:

The Village Voice, a storied progressive alt-weekly that has watchdogged New York’s political and business classes for more than half a century, is ending its print edition, its owner announced Tuesday afternoon.

The announcement is a symbolic blow for alternative weeklies across the United States, which have endured successive cuts and closures in recent years as print advertising revenue has dried up. The Village Voice, founded in 1955, is regarded as one of the first alt-weeklies and counts among its alumni crusading journalists and literary authors such as Wayne Barrett and Norman Mailer.

The New York Times carried today an editorial from ex-employee Tom Robbins:

It was a paper so famously cantankerous that Norman Mailer, a co-founder, quit writing for it out of rage over a copy-editing error; a paper where writers like Jack Newfield and Alexander Cockburn took up chunks of the letters page with pointed barbs against each other’s politics; where the poet and columnist joel oppenheimer wrote only in lower case; where the often feverish sentences of the dance critic Jill Johnston became an adventure in themselves; where the critic Ellen Willis properly called out the largely white male staff on their feminist failures.

It was a paper whose tabloid layout lent itself to Jules Feiffer’s wistful Village characters, and the often bizarre antics of the street people depicted by his fellow cartoonists Stan Mack and Mark Alan Stamaty. Its pages carried a constant stream of photographs by The Voice’s Fred McDarrah, who managed to capture everyone from the Village political boss Carmine DeSapio to Andy Warhol hard at work in the Factory.

There’s something about the shutting down of a print edition that makes any news publication feel somewhat lesser. Only so many newspapers and magazines can afford to layout and publish physical copies; on the web, the Voice is, on some level, just another website. Maybe it’s just nostalgia or some other illogical vibe, but that’s heartbreaking.

The good news is that the Voice still publishes quality work, like Fahmida Rashid’s piece on the vagarities of an education in cybersecurity.