Today’s entrant: David Carr of the New York Times, who’s an interesting and clever writer. Usually. Not this time. In a piece about the redesign of the New York Observer, which has gone from broadsheet (i.e., New York Times size) to tabloid (i.e., New York Post size), Carr loses it entirely:

The Observer used the conventions of the broadsheet, with its stacked headlines and narrow columns, to play against type: it unleashed a waterfall of improbable display language splattered with exclamation points, ellipses and question marks that created a libretto before the reader even started the article. In its broadsheet incarnation — with the wingspan of a Cessna, it enrolled adjoining commuters in the reading experience whether or not they liked it — there was a majesty and idiosyncrasy to the endeavor. The cover illustrations generally said it all: huge noggins screwed onto little bodies, advertising a kind of gigantism that a tabloid could not convey….By taking on the demure size (and presumably decreased costs) of the tabloid format, The Observer gains a consistency of form and content. But a certain graphic transgressiveness is gone….[A]s a thing — and the physical properties of a print publication are more important in the digital age, not less so — The Observer has been trimmed in a way that makes it fit in all too well.