In the days leading up to last week's opening of the 2006 Major League Baseball season, everybody who was talking about baseball was talking about steroids, with the exception of Barry Bonds, who was talking about jumping off the Empire State Building. For anyone who cares about sports, especially this sport, this is really a shame. Game of Shadows, an All the President's Men for baseball, is at the center of these conversations. The book asserts that Bonds began seriously taking steroids (and taking steroids seriously) in the off-season of 1998 and increased dosage thereafter.

It's pretty believable. Not only does Bonds' body no longer fit its frame, but the numbers support the notion. In 1999 Bonds ended the season with 34 home runs and 83 RBI in 102 games. In '98 he played 54 more games and had only three more humdingers. 2000? Still 13 less games than '98, but 12 more homers. 2001, though, is the most clear, and ridiculous jump. Bonds went from hitting 49 home runs in the previous season (a reasonable number for a great ballplayer on a tough workout regimen) to hitting 73 that year. Absurd. So obnoxious.

Now it's what everyone focused on, even though the season opened with a should-have-been-great face-off between the Cleveland Indians and the World Champion ChiSox. On the one hand, this is a very serious issue and it's threatening a game many of us love. On the other, is anybody surprised by the book's allegations? Was anybody really surprised by Jose Canseco's book? If we're more interested in the scandal than the excitement of the rest of baseball, the real part of baseball, the Barry Bondses and 'roids have already won.

A few weeks ago, when the Knight Ridder chain of newspapers was acquired and dismantled by McClatchy, Co. the media had one of its charming rounds of self-examination: What's the future of the newspaper industry? What's the impact of Craiglsist.org on the business model? Will Wall Street ever care about newspapers again? Having withstood the blow of television news would American newspapers be killed off by the Internet? It was only at the end of most of these reports that anyone mentioned that the Internet doesn't have to mean the end of the newspaper, just the end of the current business model.

Developing a digital version of the nation's newspapers is happening, albeit slowly. Internet advertising netted the newspaper industry two billion dollars last year, but that was a bit off from the 47 billion traditional advertising brought in. Still, the transition has begun and the first major newspaper to figure it out stands to enjoy a long reign as one of the leading news sources in the digital world. (Television outlets seem slower to respond to the new media, perhaps because the Internet has only recently developed the breadth and speed to offer reliable audio/visual content as well as print and graphics.)

The New York Times online has made another move toward figuring out its future. Last year it unveiled the unimaginative Times Select, to make the website more profitable and less open. Last week's change, however, was aesthetic. One of the world's most popular sites has a new look.



First and foremost are some simple changes in type face. The new headline and menu type is not sans-serif, (unlike in print media, unembellished fonts like arial or verdana is considered easiest to read off a monitor) but it is simpler, cleaner, and easier to read. And some of the smaller type faces -- for bylines, story summaries, submenus etc., -- are entirely without serifs and very easy on the eyes. The website now looks different than the print paper, but it is different and making content easy to read off a monitor is a challenge any website with lots of written material must overcome.

The headline colors have also been tweaked into a more subtle, more grown-up palette that owes less to the automatic bright blue the Internet used to foist on all hyperlinks and more to a conscious design choice. The spacing, menus, and even the weight of the lines used to separate stories are all more elegant now, giving the site more coherence and style.

In a message to readers when the site unveiled its new look, nytimes.com expressed hope that it had better incorporated multimedia content. It has done that, adding a regular slot on the front page for video clips, slideshows and the like and moving its front page picture closer to the center of the site. It also has put increased emphasis on community by heightening the profile of "most-popular" lists. The most-popular stories list has doubled, been given more regular and prominent placement, and been joined by catalogues of the most popular blogged entries and the most popular searches on the site. Hyperlinks within stories have also increased, making overdue use of the Internet's most basic offering.

The only thing that makes nytimes.com less accessible in the wake of the overhaul is a surprising, almost daunting width. The site continues on to the right for some ways and folks with certain browser/monitor combinations may find themselves doing the dreaded horizontal scroll.

I've always enjoyed a liberal dose of condescension toward USA Today. I have delighted in calling it McPaper and sneering at its polls. It's obvious attempt to mimic television news is a classic example of playing to one's weaknesses. Newspapers, the editors of USA Today may be keen to learn, are not television. They have their own strengths and should play to them. The USA Today route is as bizarrely futile as television news in those countries that haven't yet developed television news and instead pay their anchors to sit on teevee and read the local newspapers. My first reaction to the new New York Times was similar. What's all this video content and community nonsense? Real men read, they read thick clouds of type without a care in the world for picture and video. Then I remembered that, indeed, the Internet is the medium to end all media, the great uniter. Unlike USA Today, nytimes.com ought to become less of a newspaper. It has new strengths to play to.

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