This article was disappointing. I was expecting slightly more in-depth analysis into the workings of Craigslist and instead I got a rant about Newspaper websites.
http://www.splicetoday.com/politics-and-media/five-key-reaso...
The piece you're critiquing is a WSJ editorial, written for a generalist audience. Wyman may be the only media critic out there pushing the argument that it's not just the business model but the technical design of newspaper sites that's holding them back. It's hard to say there's nothing to his argument.
> Indeed, I submit that it's hard to look at virtually any news site out there and not notice how its architecture and presentation differ from that of Craigslist, which has several times any news site's number of users.
> So it's not surprising that the single most salient weakness of a mainstream news site is that in the end it is a corporate showcase, a striking contrast to the Craigslist model. The vocabulary of the architecture speaks plainly that the page is there to serve not readers, but to articulate the structure of the company behind it.
> That architecture is depressingly similar. The typical news site doesn't take advantage of the wide horizontal window of the browser. Instead, it is framed inside a square or vertical box. And inside that frame, the reader is presented with four or five—and sometimes even seven or eight—horizontal lines of information or navigation before the first actual story headline appears.
> Ultimately, I would like about 99% fewer navigation links on the page, but will settle for 90% fewer. For that service, a newspaper site can hit me with all the ads it wants, or charge me any amount of money. But until it provides this simple and I think obvious service to readers, one can't help suspecting that a newspaper's approach to the Web is incomplete.
Some very good design points there, and those are just a few sentences I chose. I learned a little bit, so I think this one is worth the short read.
The general trick is to search for a substring using Google and then click off of the search page; the pay wall isn't in place if the referring web site is Google.