Top blogging in May

Here's a look at some of my most popular posts with readers the past month — whether they were written last month or not.

Topping the list?

My old deceased frenemy of sorts, Actual Flatticus, and my massive overview of Flatty's political life history on Twitter and elsewhere.

Second, my blogging about the Dallas Morning Snooze / Belo taking a bath on the sale of the Belo building, below what Belo said it would expect to get a year ago, and far below what it got on an initial spec bid based on anticipating Amazon's second HQ coming to Big D. Always fun to kick the Snooze in the nads. There's more Snooze-kicking throughout my blog; just click the labels on that piece.

Third, Texas Greens getting an apparent ballot access win from the Lege, as we await Gov. Strangeabbott's hoped-for signature.

Fourth was Rod Rosenstein blasting James Comey into bits.

Fifth was me blasting Ted Rall into bits, which is getting closer and closer to Snooze-blasting levels of fun.

Snooze takes bath on Belo Building sale

Last fall, after moving out of the historic Belo Building, AND not even spending money to move "The Rock of Truth" to its rented digs, the, I am sorry, The Dallas Morning News sold the building for $33 million.

Although nobody would officially tie this to Amazon's national Grifting for Dollars work as it hunted for a second headquarters, which it eventually of course split into two parts and has now pulled back on the NYC part, everybody saw it that way, especially since KDC and Hoque backed out soon after Amazon said sorry to Dallas.

Well, the Snooze has now sold it again.

For $5 million less.

In addition, original buyer KDC said that if it resold to Amazon, the Snooze would get a cut. New buyer Ray Washburne made no such pledge, even though, technically, Amazon could come calling. He's also paying less than $6M of it up front.

There's that anti-Midas touch at work! And, it should be noted that Belo, at the time of the original sale and the run-up to it, had said it thought the site was worth more than $30 million. Guess again.

Per that second link, which is from D Magazine, it seems hard not to see a push by an activist shareholder for Belo to go private and/or sell the paper as being behind this in some way. A letter from said shareholder notes that Belo's digital marketing has tanked even more than the paper itself.

I think, re the digital marketing, what we have is a signature moment mix of Belo arrogance and Belo stupidity. That said, said activist investor could have found 15-20 straight years of semi-regular occurrences of that; nobody forced him to buy his shares.

Meanwhile, back to the buildings.

The Snooze had first semi-promised the legend-hoary Rock of Truth would move. Then it didn't.

And on that legend-hoariness? Per D Magazine, Jim Schutze hoist teh Snooze by its own petard three years ago.

Google makes it easier to avoid Morning News website

First, let me say, as tens of thousands of others in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex have said over the last three-plus years since the Snooze, officially known as The (don’t forget to capitalize that “the,” New York Times pretentiousness and all) Dallas Morning News, changed its website to its current form.

It sucks.

It sucks donkey dongs.

It sucks George Bannerman Dealey’s donkey dong, in fact.

It is probably THE WORST website of any major seven-day daily newspaper in the United States, excepting of course, other A.H. Belo papers in Riverside, Calif. and Providence, R.I. (Belo websites suck because Belo blows — the different papers’ websites are mirror images.)

One of the worst things about the Snooze’s website is the impossibility of finding any Snooze story that is not actually linked on the website’s homepage. The story may have been written in the last 24 hours; it may have run in that day’s hardcopy.

But, if it ain’t on the homepage of the website, you ain’t gonna find it.

Solution? After getting frustrated at the donkey-dong sucking Snooze website (see for yourself), I go to Google News, hit the advanced news search, enter Dallas Morning News as my search (don’t even have to use “the,” let alone the prissy-fit capitalized version), and then enter my normal Google search words.

Voila! Link(s) spit out to just the right articles.

Well, now, Google is going one step further.

This month, the company introduced a search-within-search feature that lets users stay on Google to find pages on popular sites like those of The Washington Post, Wikipedia, The New York Times, Wal-Mart and others. The search box appears when someone enters the name of certain Web addresses or company names — say, “Best Buy” — rather than entering a request like “cellphones.”

The results of the search are almost all individual company pages. Google tops those results with a link to the home page of the Web site in question, adds another search box, and offers users the chance to let Google search for certain things within that site.

The problem, for some in the industry, is that when someone enters a term into that secondary search box, Google will display ads for competing sites, thereby profiting from ads it sells against the brand. The feature also keeps users searching on Google pages and not pages of the destination Web site.

Tough shit. Your unsearchable website, with further editorial cuts ahead, certainly won’t get better. If anything, it will get worse.

Oh, and to throw you further under the bus… you have a paper always bragging about the APME awards it wins for sports coverage, then it outsources all its high school stuff to a third-party site, one that doesn’t have as much online high school sports as the DMN did five years ago.

You don’t like it? Make your own website better. Google is, indeed, just saving me more work now.