I used to visit The Register almost every day up until a few years ago. Back then, it was famous for its punny headlines, tongue-in-cheek reporting style, and all in all being a self-identified IT tabloid.
I visited it again a week or two ago, and it seems to have dropped the humourous tone and intentionally-obscure headlines, to become just one more samey IT news page.
Does anybody know what caused this transformation? Has it been acquired by a conglomerate or something? The nearest thing I've found is that its original Chief Editor left in May 2019...
> 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.
I have seen how the old style was, yes it different, but I wouldn't say its a run of the mill IT website.
Its reporting is pretty good, and they have good opinion pieces, like intel optane possible revolution for IT(1), tracking obfuscation by big tech (2) and safari WebKit limiting mobile web (3) articles.
1. https://www.theregister.com/2022/08/01/optane_intel_cancella...
2. https://www.theregister.com/2022/05/23/opinion_column/
3. https://www.theregister.com/2022/06/06/big_techs_big_privacy...
There are other website like InfoWorld, which produced articles like how docker broke in half, however their website is annoying, and in general less focus on FOSS/Linux.
https://www.infoworld.com/article/3632142/how-docker-broke-i...
There has been a decline in quality with obvious errors caused by poor research or rushed publishing. There has been an increase in sponsored copy, and also a marked hardening of its already notorious Apple bashing.
There have also been a number of occasions where they've simply missed reporting on important topics altogether.
Also on their forums, there has been a decline in quality of contributions. For a while it still used to be worth going to El Reg just to read the forums, but even that is becoming increasingly pointless.
It's sad, because much of its appeal was precisely how different they were from common IT coverage that was and still is mostly written for non-IT types.
I still have it in my bookmark bar, but as I still cant get the favicon to load properly in Firefox, I forget to click on it :)
Once of the only reasons to visit them nowadays is for the BOFH (new episode every Friday): https://www.theregister.com/offbeat/bofh/
I believe Mike Magee who was one of the founders was responsible for this, and he was involved until he fell out with the direction it was going in the early 2000s, and went on to form The Inquirer, which was a similar publication (although long gone).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Magee_(journalist)
I guess over time The Register has morphed to try and be taken more seriously (in I imagine a rather competitive market), it hides it's original tagline - biting the hand that feeds IT
Otherwise theregister hit that brief window between professional magazine publishing and every teenager with a phone becoming a tech blogger, the brief window when website publishing was cheap but not yet overcrowded.
Maybe this?
> I used to visit The Register almost every day up until a few years ago.
Years of not going
> I visited it again a week or two ago,
Looking for some upside - Vulture Classic was pretty alcoholic and misogynistic - two features which I found rather unattractive.
FWIW, lately I feel like it's been on an uptick.
Let's compare it to google which had a burst of activity and even inspiration at first and then lost its way after Schmidt stopped being CEO. OK, El Reg isn't one of the largest corporations in the world (well, at least they won't admit it and hide it well) but on this dimension I think it's done better than Google.
For me the FQDN will always be www.theregister.co.uk.
(I assume this is the .com is the same as theregister.co.uk -- the place that bought BOFH etc)
The politics (identity and anti-Trump reddit-style) stuff crept in too, especially from its San Fran office, but you could obviously just choose to ignore those articles. It's not something I want from a tech site though.
It's a shame, ElReg and Slashdot used be my go-to site for tech content.
I can see how someone might not allow that to happen and then just milk the thing.
Now if we want to tounge-in-cheek tech humour, we are left with. . . techdirt.com?