What a stupid executive decision on the part of the Sun-Times. I don't have as many Sun-Times links as Trib links, but still, over the years, they add up.

I wonder if it was even an executive decision... I mean, it's hard to imagine somebody consciously deciding to do that. Is it possible they were just that oblivious?

From a systems guy perspective, I'm sure the tech staff raised the issue, the executive didn't understand the issue and asked how much it would cost to do it right, and when he passed the number on to finance it got shot down.

Sounds about right. The real failure here is that they don't even know what their core business is...

That's bothersome, absolutely. But the Sun-Times's links weren't truly permanent before.

There were many instances I linked to something in, say, Robert Feder's column to find the content was gone in a week or two. I noticed that the Tribune, too, is doing something similar - they're *recycling* URLs, so something that points to a story in January will point to an entirely different one in September.

It's just lame.

On top of that, I don't care for the redesigns to the Pioneer Press papers - the Oak Leaves site looks and feels just like the Sun-Times's now.

Worse (can you believe it?) if I click the Oak Leaves logo to return to the homepage, it takes me to the Evanston Review. I suspect they're redirecting based on geography, which is beyond stupid.

(On further review, it looks like it's just an error on the page and not fancy-schmancy redirecting. There goes my conspiracy theory!)

wow, I didn't know that -- in fact, link permanence is one of the main reason I tend to link to the Sun-Times rather than the Trib. It's amazing that newspapers could miss the importance of having permanent links to old news on the internet... might be interested to look at stats for a site like WaPo that keeps the permalinks and encourages them vs the Trib or the Sun-Times.

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