Moderate progress, within the limits of the law

Recognition where it is due: there was a time, for eleven or twelve years there, when the only reason to read the once-mighty daily Politika was for a bit of ethnographic voyeurism, to see what parts of their fantasies the bizarre characters of the old regime imagined were respectable enough to put out into public. It was kind of like the early-nineties work of Madonna, only inclining more to the horrifying than to the entertaining. Since late 2000 it has changed a bit. Now reading Politika is a little bit like shopping at Filene's Basement -- it's not that there is nothing worthwhile to be found, but there is a lot of other stuff to plow through before you find it. More recently the paper has also massively improved its graphic design, I am told through the services of the mighty Mirko Ilić. Now Politika has introduced a new web site. It is an improvement on the old one, but the old one was a disaster. Before they offered fewer than ten articles a day and took them all down after three days, with no archive. Now they offer many more articles, giving at least an impressionistic overview of the major sections of the paper. The selection is a bit odd: today they lead off with a long-range weather prediction, for example. They still do not provide an archive; every other major Belgrade paper provides a complete online archive.

The new Politika web site is a bit like the new Politika. It is better than it was, but considering what it was, it would have been hard for it to be worse. Bit of a synecdoche, really.