The LAT gets creative on its web site, giving us a rundown of the hip-hop stars 50 Cent has had “beefs” with in a reported slide show.

The format, however, isn’t easy to use, and if you don’t know specifically what it is you’ve clicked on, it’s hard to figure out that a) you’re in a slide show and b) that you’re supposed to click the “next” button to move one.

(Forgive me for getting granular here, but sloppy execution is a key reason newspaper web sites don’t always click with web-savvy readers, who tend to skew younger and are exactly the people the newspaper sites need to attract more of. So it’s worth discussing in detail why the feature doesn’t work)

The whole presentation is a little low rent. The first problem is that the link from the front page doesn’t say it’s a slide show. The second is a product of the fact that newspaper web sites tend to keep entirely separate the writers’ “text” and the mechanics of the web site.

Here, that dichotomy makes the presentation of a nice idea mightily confusing. The intro from writer Chris Lee is written in a vague and gnomic fashion, and it ends with what seems to be a big typo–a colon with nothing after it. A photo credit forlornly floats in the space after the text stops, as if it had slipped off its proper place on the photo opposite it.

The intro to the slideshow should have explicitly told visitors what they were getting into: “50 Cent disses so many people that the only way to make sense of it all is to set up a slide show and let him hurl his brickbats one by one. Click here to begin the show, and hit the ‘next’ button on the right-hand top of each frame to see his next victim.”

Beyond that, 50 Cent’s quotes are mildly diverting, though the intro should have taken time to note how manufactured a lot of these beefs are. On the other hand, 50 Cent is saying he will retire from rapping if Kanye West moves more CDs than him next week, when both rappers have new records out. Would that it were true.