[diodesign]

Hello, I'm Chris Williams, the editor of The Register. Maybe I can answer some of these Qs.

> what caused this transformation?

All things have to evolve and move with the times. As you've said, we were known, for example, for "intentionally-obscure headlines." Guess what, that works for some people - and it was fun - but it was holding us back reaching many more people, not just from the headline tone but also aggregation and sharing. And I want our original, technical, and best coverage seen by as many folks as possible.

The Reg has been going for 20+ years. We have to keep up with what people want. And yes, some people liked the 2010s era, some missed the 2000s era, but also many more thought we weren't taking journalism seriously. We do take it seriously (we don't take ourselves too seriously) and I'd hate for headlines to hold that back.

What's really changed is that we've styled the main headlines to be more accessible in every way, and still keep our sardonic, informed voice in stories and sub-headlines. We have a mix of core IT stories; software and open source; where life meets tech; science; and more, written in a way that gives our tech readers a voice.

If you haven't read us in a while, then yes, we've changed visibly. If you've been reading us for more than a year or two, the change will have been fairly gradual as we tune our headlines to match what people expect from an irreverent technical title.

> Has it been acquired by a conglomerate?

No, it's still independently owned, with owners who give editorial free rein. It's documented in UK Companies House.

> its original Chief Editor left in May 2019

No, you're thinking of an executive editor who left around then, who wasn't in a management position (think editor-at-large).

C.

[alisonatwork]

Thank you for responding to this topic, although what you're saying does disappoint me. I've been an on-and-off Reg reader since the Slashdot days, and I loved the style. But, like many UK media outlets in the past few years, there seems to be a push to "globalize" the product - most notably by replacing .co.uk domains with .com, but also in reducing the cynicism and irreverence that used to make UK media worth reading even for people who weren't living in the UK. Nowadays I'm finding it's getting hard to distinguish British outlets from American outlets a lot of the time - presumably because everyone needs to optimize their content to suit the lowest-common-denominator algorithms of US-owned tech giants. I can't really blame you for following suit, but it does contribute to the overall homogenization of the media, in my opinion.

[marttt]

".. like many UK media outlets in the past few years, there seems to be a push to "globalize" the product .. also in reducing the cynicism and irreverence that used to make UK media worth reading even for people who weren't living in the UK."

Isn't this actually a more general cultural shift. On the societal level, or on the level of the entire developed world. It often feels like people are simply tired of cynicism these days.

Being a trained journalist, I have observed something similar in my own country: former witty, extremely-clever-but-cynical outlets have changed to a more neutral style in recent years. I do think this is an obvious win for journalism, or at least for investigative reporting. They can possibly dig a little deeper this way. More focus on the hard work of bringing serious problems to light, less focus on crafting mean headlines.

Also, as a side note, I'd say it is actually much easier to write a "cynical" headline as compared to one that is not mean, but still playful and multi-layered. IMO cynicism is mostly a low-hanging fruit; which is why this is such a common "closet addiction" in many newsrooms.

[nocoiner]

Every single headline in The New Republic used to be a delightfully clever gem, but at some point in the past two decades, that practice descended into mediocrity alongside the outlet as a whole.

[sn0w_monkie]

I have noticed the British spelling of words has disappeared too. Is every writer there murican now?

[mc32]

Noah's revenge, surely.

[papageek]

Sounds like Walmart and McDonalds slowly replacing local options.

[PointlessLogin]

> former witty, extremely-clever-but-cynical outlets have changed to a more neutral style in recent years.

Which is why Private Eye is so popular and has record sales figures!

(Hint: It remains as British and as cynical as ever)

[anthk]

Spaniard here. Back in the day we had Slashdot (most IT/science educated guys in Spain can at least read English because of obvious requeriments on academia) and a Spanish analogue, Barrapunto (same meaning, slash/bar and punto/dot/point). A literal clone, with quality comments and lots of folks teaching and learning at. Later, a Digg clone appeared, Menéame (lit. "shake me"), a Digg clone to share/aggregate news.

But the sad thing it's Barrapunto is not more since a decade (they plugged the servers down a few years ago) and Meneame took its position, and politic arguments took over the "geeky" environment.

I miss these days, I could learn geeky and tech stuff in both languages and chat with geniouses daily. Reddit did the same for Slashdot, ok, but you kept Slashdot on.

Here, in the Spanish world (not even the whole Hispanic world across th pond) the legacy tech sites are dead, even for the Usenet es.* and esp.* (for latam hiers) . You have Slashdot at least, Ars Technica, Usenet, IRC and even Fido/Dovenet.

[silasdavis]

Classic missing the punto HN side comment (sorry), but as a británico learning Spanish I thought it would be good to try and learn the Spanish keyboard layout. Barra punto is horribly hard to type. I keep having to switch when I want to run something in CWD. I do appreciate the dedicated jamón key though.

[Bakary]

As someone who needs to cycle between multiple languages I fully recommend the use of the "US international" layout in this scenario

[anthk]

I just use the us-acentos-swapctrlcaps layout.

[KennyBlanken]

> As you've said, we were known, for example, for "intentionally-obscure headlines." Guess what, that works for some people - and it was fun - but it was holding us back reaching many more people, not just from the headline tone but also aggregation and sharing. And I want our original, technical, and best coverage seen by as many folks as possible.

This is like being a curry shop known for having intensely flavorful but spicy curry - thus having dedicated fans who enjoy that flavor - and toning it down in flavor and spice because you want to have more general appeal. Now nobody thinks of you as "that shop with the intense curry" but just one of many curry shops.

Now you're just like every other shitty tech news website and competing for the same generic eyeballs who will read a story from you that happens to appear in google news and never come back.

[noAnswer]

OP literally left despise them having "intense curry".

[donpott]

OP here. I think it's an apt metaphor. To expand/clarify, I would say that the spiciness of the curry was at the same time hard work (ie. having to parse the headlines, for example) and the main reason I went to this restaurant (it made it unique, it was a differentiator). I would visit it occasionally for a treat (or whenever a big event happened in Tech, although I'm mixing my metaphors now), but not as something one does every day.

[jimmaswell]

But it's just the headlines allegedly, not the rest of the writing, at least.

[oxfordmale]

The problem now is that you take journalism serious and it has just become yet another boring website. A lot of articles also read like advertisements in disguise.

[oceanplexian]

Same thing happened with Engadget and Gizmodo. Used to absolutely love reading them on a daily basis, product reviews were always super technical and a bit off the wall, it had that hackaday-type vibe.

Now they are a spammy lowest-common-denominator pop culture “tech news” and cell phone reviews.

[xtracto]

This is so interesting, I used to read The Register back in the mid 2000s. I learned about it by stories posted to /. and later loved the headers, it is what attracted my attention. For one reason or another I stopped reading it and a couple of months ago I stumbled upon an article and remembered I liked it quite a lot.

Now I understand why it has not captured my attention in these last years: I checked the homepage and the titles are pretty vanilla, they don't read tongue in cheek not witty, which is something I liked. Nothing wrong with that, I assume the standard editorial style attracts a broader audience.

[hateful]

I am seeing a parallel here to the article posted yesterday about how everything is measured by engagement: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32765002

As a product, I would think that you would survive by finding a niche and expanding it. But these changes seem to try to compete for engagement rather than serve the niche.

Yes, you expand your business and make more money - but I would also think that the competition would be more fierce as a trade off.

Kind of wish it could be a setting "sarcasm on".

It's also very similar to how by a bands second or third album (after they hit it big) - they end up changing their sound (often sounding like every other band in the process) - because they go on tour and then they tailor their music to what makes the crown react more.

[gerdesj]

I've been a British reader of el Reg for roughly 20 years. Please do remember where you came from and how your brand came to differentiate itself.

You have aggressively used the word "folks" without a license 8)

el Reg has always had a tone and attitude all of its own. Let's face it the forums are pretty functionally crap and yet it sort of works.

Mess with the format at your peril - make the forums/comments work effectively ... that would be nice.

I have no idea why you insist on calling it "the Reg", it's currently "el Reg" due to the Spanish influence unless you can do better ...

Do you remember say "Eadon"? or a Canadian bloke with a decently potty mouth (Trev).

[spaceman_2020]

Another victim of SEO requirements :(

Punny headlines unfortunately are terrible for targeting keywords

[lofaszvanitt]

Exactly, that's why s-engine monopolies are bad. People don't see it, but it is a big step towards giving fellatio to a machine. If you want to be unique you will suffer, because the shitty search engine that has monopoly over the market governs what will get a green light and what won't. And as the years pass more and more the faceless, intangible corpo backed machine bullshit will govern our lives.

[ghaff]

You can compensate somewhat in the metadata but you still need to convince people to click and it's very easy to cross the line from clever but clear to punny and obscure. I imagine that if I looked through the current issue of The Economist, I'd find some clever headlines but it would still be pretty clear what the stories were about.

This isn't a new thing. When I was an industry analyst we also liked to do clever stuff in titles which at least one editor pushed back on. However, we were mostly a fully paywalled subscription so it was less of a consideration in our case.

[caeril]

> as we tune our headlines to match what people expect from an irreverent technical title.

Except you're not irreverent at all anymore. You're basically Ars and CNET. Why on earth you'd abandon your readership to attract people who already read Ars, and are unlikely to move, is beyond me.

[givemeethekeys]

I'm sure you're doing whats best for the organization. The changes took away from what made you unique, fun and independent.

[ChrisMarshallNY]

For what it's worth, El Reg is still a daily visit for me (I think I've probably done so, for 20 years), and I've been known to fly in and sprinkle drops of Holy Pee (in the comments section -I don't do any authoring of content), from time to time.

I like that it (still, despite the insinuation) is a RedTop in spirit, and I am generally quite impressed by the technical level of its staff.

I do like that you have given Dabbsy and Simon a good home. Thanks for that.

Just one drop in the ocean of data, but I'm glad you guys are around.

[UncleSlacky]

Dabbsy's gone, unfortunately. Not sure what went on there, but I suspect he wasn't "serious" enough. He's still at Autosave is for Wimps though:

https://autosaveisforwimps.substack.com

[ChrisMarshallNY]

Aw, that's sad. I enjoyed his SFTW stuff.

[LinuxBender]

All things have to evolve and move with the times.

This makes sense. Somewhere I have an old hacker t-shirt that says Evolve or die that supports the mantra.

If I could make one feature request of ElReg it would be that the system used by your editors puts a hard cap on article descriptions to 80 characters so I do not have to do creative editorializing of the links when I submit them here. At times I find it very difficult to submit a link and have it still make sense.

[donpott]

Hi Chris,

OP here. Just wanted to say thanks a million for taking he time and sharing your insightful reply. I don't have any original/interesting points to make, so I'll let the other commenters follow-up.

[travisgriggs]

Thanks for sharing Chris.

Sounds basically like you were left with:

"To Assimilate or To Differentiate? That is The [Business] Question."

(to misquote another great British writer)

[riedel]

I think it is good that independent media outlets transition rather than die. I liked the old days better, but I truly admit that ppl like me that came once in a while (mostly to get a totally different view in a very concrete news item) wouldn't pay your bills. For me the the tone was the USP: it signalled clearly independence from the copy and paste rest. Probably today you could achieve sth very similar with a language model, so you were probably wise to abandon it, before all other news site would have looked like yours. Still some how I believe that this could have been the better reality.

[flarg]

I fully support your change in approach. The Reg was always a solid source of information and opinion but the jokey headlines were, IMHO, often off putting in my later years. You finally graduated out of the frat house!

[ttctciyf]

Just wanted to say thanks for the many chuckles I've had over your knowing tabloidese headline pastiches over the years. Hope they'll continue to make occasional appearances.

[2ringtest]

The Register used to be for dicks, now it's actually good. So well done Chris!

[jahnu]

I stopped reading it years ago when it started getting gratuitously contrarian. After this reply from Chris I’m going to give it another go now.

[trelane]

Now its just for Tom and Harry?

[jachee]

Sure, but also Jane.

[siliconpotato]

> still keep our sardonic, informed voice in stories and sub-headlines.

That's a shame. I can't stand the smug yet awfully constructed articles. The house style is beyond irritating, and I assumed Andrew orlowski was to blame, but I see he now writes for spiked (enough said) but if the writing style still makes it so hard to read, I'll continue to give it a swerve

[travisgriggs]

Can you share with us how this is working? Are you indeed seeing a wider audience? I don't visit as much as I used to (I checked just now and wasn't pulled in), but if you're able to better put bread on your tables for the changes, then I get it. I'd be curious if you'd be willing to share any candid observations of what you've seen since drifting these changes in.

[GnarfGnarf]

Can you bring back Verity Stob? Smartest, funniest IT writing I've ever seen. Right up there with Unix Hater's Handbook

[antongribok]

I miss the old El Reg! I sincerely hope you find a balance.

Yelling! Yahoo! Headlines! were always easy to parse and will be missed.

[LetMeInNowMate]

> but it was holding us back reaching many more people,

Christ mate! Long term El-Reg reader here.

The pure Blightly, homegrown, sarcastic piss taking tone is why I read the Reg, and so do many others. Selling out to some bland US-corporate bullshit WILL loose you readers.

And BTW, can we have the 'Paris' icon back? Please.

[tejtm]

Exactly, as a Murcan, how else could I have learned to whinge about trick-cyclists? you know with a setting, ala old.reddit, you could double down and get those things that need getting said out of the way for your neutered newsletter.