The New York Times website has certainly seen better days. The financially-strapped company blundered late last year with its TimesSelect gimmick, placing its regular columnists behind a subscription scheme and strangling its circulation. ... So you would think that a little incentive to stick with the site would be in order. Instead, it's lately been transformed into a crowded visual wasteland, and one inconvenient to navigate, at least for those wise enough to surf the web with JavaScript and other potentially dangerous active content disabled.

So this, then, is the Gray Lady's answer to its loss of credibility, from the Jayson Blair fiasco, to Judith Miller's hard-selling of the Iraq war with absolute rubbish for sources and zero evidence, to spiking a story with serious implications for the 2002 elections: more buttons, whistles, and bells.

The management should be bloodying their knees apologising. Instead, they're distracting us, hoping we'll be captivated by their poorly-executed high-tech gimmickry.