I’ve noted before how the Tribune’s handling of its R. Kelly coverage is pretty lame:

Incidentally, the Tribune’s odd handling of its R. Kelly stories continues. Where the Sun-Times has always had an R. Kelly main page on the web on which you could access all of the paper’s voluminous R. Kelly coverage, the Tribune’s promotion of this valuable archive online has been spotty. (Valuable to the paper I mean; it’s the logical place for folks around the world to find comprehensive coverage of the trial.) You need to find an actual R. Kelly story, and then try to navigate the (non-chronological) list of stories to the left to get up to speed. If there’s a home page for the paper’s Kelly coverage I’ve never been able to find it.

Now, it seems, some of the early stories in the case have disappeared, apparently because the Trib removes two-week-old stories and sticks them in a (for pay) archive. The Trib had an early deal with AOL and I’ve always thought it was an operation with sophisticated web folks around.

Is it possible, in 2008, that the paper’s web people don’t notice stories drawing increased attention and get to work maximizing the interest? What kind of numbskulls start taking down their on-the-scene coverage of a local story of international interest? Sam Zell know about this?

Now, check out this screen shot of the paper’s acquittal story. (It encompasses the entire screen on my laptop; I had to lower the type size just to get a shot that included story text.) In its desperation to monetize, the paper’s web site fills the window with Google ads. The subject of most of them are funny, but besides that it’s not really a very reader-friendly way of doing things: