The homepage is editorial argument made visible. The decisions about what goes at the top, what gets a photograph, what runs side by side — these are not just design choices. They are claims about what is important and how different things relate to each other.
Most readers no longer see the homepage. They arrive via social media, search, or newsletters, directly to the article they were looking for. The publication’s editorial judgment about relative importance is invisible to them.
This is a real loss, though it is a loss that most publishers have not fully accounted for. The homepage was one of the few remaining places where a publication could show you its whole argument at once — here is what we think matters, here is how we think about the world, here is what we have decided is worth your time today.
Without it, what the reader gets is a single piece, stripped of context, which may or may not represent what the publication is actually about.
Some publications have responded by investing more in their newsletters, which perform a similar function. A good newsletter is a curated front page sent directly to the reader. It is, in some ways, a homepage that travels.
But the newsletter only reaches subscribers. The homepage reached anyone who came looking.
I do not know how to solve this problem. I am not sure it is solvable in the current environment. But I think it is worth being clear about what we lost.