There's no shortage of problems for today's print media. From business models that appear fundamentally flawed to allegations of bias (from all sides, no less), an editor can invoke plenty of demons to keep him up nights. But of all the troublesome pests hiding under print journalists' beds, it seems the biggest, ugliest, and sleep-deprivingest is the aesthetic appeal of one's internet page. Pity the poor newsmen sitting bolt upright in cold sweats, fretting over their serif-ed fonts and listless blogs.

The latest rag to give itself a face lift is the old gray lady herself, who stepped out this morning all switched around with a centered photo, a vertically tiered organization, and a rather more intense concentration of ads (see image at bottom left). The mixture of fonts, sizes, and colors in the text at the top of the page is a little dazzling, but it's not as bad as the section heads at the bottom, where they might as well repeat "words" across the page for all its readability. TimesSelect, the paper's pay service, still lives. Said Leonard Apcar, Editor in Chief of NYTimes.com:

We have expanded the page to take advantage of the larger monitors now used by the vast majority of our readers. We've improved the navigation throughout the site so that no matter what page you land on, you can easily dig deeper into other sections or use our multimedia.

Of course, the New York Times is late in the prettification game compared to our D.C. publications. The City Paper has redesigned and taken up blogging, while the Examiner has given itself a glossy and unappealing makeover that buries District news in the same category (and generally beneath) the latest national headlines. The Post has made some visual changes to its site, but has mainly seemed to approach the world of new media by throwing blogs at it and seeing what sticks (so far, accusations of plagiarism). At least half of the front page is consumed daily by post.blog updates explaining the difference between The Washington Post and WashingtonPost.com.

The obvious difficulty for all of these publications is maintaining a dedicated staff of journalists while print revenues fall. The pressure has led to what The New Republic's Michelle Cottle calls, disparagingly, the democratization of journalism (she writes this, appropriately, behind a subscription wall). She cites the case of the Wisconsin State Journal, which had its readers vote on which topics should be placed on the next day's front page, but you can see the same effect at the Times, where the redesign directs readers to popular stories and personalizes each user's reading experience, and at the Post, where every demographic, geographic, and political subgroup has or soon will have its own blog, even if the paper can't afford to pay anyone to provide the content.

There aren't easy answers for these papers, as they struggle to find a workable revenue stream. Perhaps these redesigns are meant to buy time while new business plans are hatched. Or perhaps they're part of an aesthetic arms race, where each paper's upgrade leaves its competitors looking old and cheap. In any event, they'd do well to remember the importance of content, and of credibility.

(Coming next week: DCist's redesign).