The day I left "mainstream" news forever
news.com.au (NCA) is a news website run by News Limited (part of the same group of companies now well known for hacking famous voice mails ), and was my last tie to the world of traditional news. It was a little guilty pleasure. Their focus was solely on catchy headlines and simple pieces of reporting that worked well for those like me looking for a five minute break. And their penchant for attaching bikini shots to any story even remotely related to the human body was also quite entertaining. Then one day NCA decided to fill the space that bordered the central main content column with ads. That in itself was not unlike a lot of big web sites. But they also chose to open the ad when you clicked anywhere in that border, even if you had scrolled down well past the actual ad content and the border just displayed white space. It was a devious tactic, as I found that I usually switched back to a browser window not by clicking the window's title bar, but by clicking in some white s...