Hello, I'm Chris Williams, the editor of The Register. Maybe I can answer some of these Qs. > what caused this transformation? All things have to evolve and move with the times. As you've said, we were known, for example, for "intentionally-obscure headlines." Guess what, that works for some people - and it was fun - but it was holding us back reaching many more people, not just from the headline tone but also aggreg…
The Register used to be for dicks, now it's actually good. So well done Chris!
Hello, I'm Chris Williams, the editor of The Register. Maybe I can answer some of these Qs. > what caused this transformation? All things have to evolve and move with the times. As you've said, we were known, for example, for "intentionally-obscure headlines." Guess what, that works for some people - and it was fun - but it was holding us back reaching many more people, not just from the headline tone but also aggreg…
Yeap, I agree. I've been reading technological news from El Reg since around 2000 and their writing style has changed a lot, it's not as humorous as it used to be. Once of the only reasons to visit them nowadays is for the BOFH (new episode every Friday): https://www.theregister.com/offbeat/bofh/
BOFH hasn't been every week since the mid-00s. I wish it were!
Eh, there's only so much of that to be had. At some point, it becomes formulaic.
Yeap, I agree. I've been reading technological news from El Reg since around 2000 and their writing style has changed a lot, it's not as humorous as it used to be. Once of the only reasons to visit them nowadays is for the BOFH (new episode every Friday): https://www.theregister.com/offbeat/bofh/
Hello, I'm Chris Williams, the editor of The Register. Maybe I can answer some of these Qs. > what caused this transformation? All things have to evolve and move with the times. As you've said, we were known, for example, for "intentionally-obscure headlines." Guess what, that works for some people - and it was fun - but it was holding us back reaching many more people, not just from the headline tone but also aggreg…
Another victim of SEO requirements :( Punny headlines unfortunately are terrible for targeting keywords
You can compensate somewhat in the metadata but you still need to convince people to click and it's very easy to cross the line from clever but clear to punny and obscure. I imagine that if I looked through the current issue of The Economist, I'd find some clever headlines but it would still be pretty clear what the stories were about.
This isn't a new thing. When I was an industry analyst we also liked to do clever stuff in titles which at least one editor pushed back on. However, we were mostly a fully paywalled subscription so it was less of a consideration in our case.
Hello, I'm Chris Williams, the editor of The Register. Maybe I can answer some of these Qs. > what caused this transformation? All things have to evolve and move with the times. As you've said, we were known, for example, for "intentionally-obscure headlines." Guess what, that works for some people - and it was fun - but it was holding us back reaching many more people, not just from the headline tone but also aggreg…
I'm sure you're doing whats best for the organization.
The changes took away from what made you unique, fun and independent.
Hello, I'm Chris Williams, the editor of The Register. Maybe I can answer some of these Qs. > what caused this transformation? All things have to evolve and move with the times. As you've said, we were known, for example, for "intentionally-obscure headlines." Guess what, that works for some people - and it was fun - but it was holding us back reaching many more people, not just from the headline tone but also aggreg…
The Register used to be for dicks, now it's actually good. So well done Chris!
I stopped reading it years ago when it started getting gratuitously contrarian. After this reply from Chris I’m going to give it another go now.
Weirder is what happened to its successor theinquirer.net? It was bought and then erased. Who does that? Was it a copyright thing? Otherwise theregister hit that brief window between professional magazine publishing and every teenager with a phone becoming a tech blogger, the brief window when website publishing was cheap but not yet overcrowded.
if someone's website was "stealing" traffic from your website, then purchasing the offending site and shutting it down would be business move to eliminate competition.
I think you may be right. TheInquirer's shutdown screen in 2019 mentioned that it started in 2006, when really it started in 2001. So whoever shut it down was either ignorant of how/when it began or they wanted to mislead about the early days.
You have to see it in the context of British tabloids (mass-readership, low-brow newspapers), especially of the 80s and 90s. The Register was emulating this style of irreverant journalism. For example have a look at some Sun headlines: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/3654446.stm
Yeah, that's exactly why I never really got into the site; I got the joke, it just seemed weirdly awkward and off-putting, like having a coworker who talks like a pirate all day, every day. It's funny at first, but it drives you crazy after a while.
if they do it long and consistently enough i think i would oscillate between finding it funny and driving me crazy
Hello, I'm Chris Williams, the editor of The Register. Maybe I can answer some of these Qs. > what caused this transformation? All things have to evolve and move with the times. As you've said, we were known, for example, for "intentionally-obscure headlines." Guess what, that works for some people - and it was fun - but it was holding us back reaching many more people, not just from the headline tone but also aggreg…
Thank you for responding to this topic, although what you're saying does disappoint me. I've been an on-and-off Reg reader since the Slashdot days, and I loved the style. But, like many UK media outlets in the past few years, there seems to be a push to "globalize" the product - most notably by replacing .co.uk domains with .com, but also in reducing the cynicism and irreverence that used to make UK media worth reading even for people who weren't living in the UK. Nowadays I'm finding it's getting hard to distinguish British outlets from American outlets a lot of the time - presumably because everyone needs to optimize their content to suit the lowest-common-denominator algorithms of US-owned tech giants. I can't really blame you for following suit, but it does contribute to the overall homogenization of the media, in my opinion.
