> 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.

Isn't this actually a more general cultural shift. On the societal level, or on the level of the entire developed world. It often feels like people are simply tired of cynicism these days.

Being a trained journalist, I have observed something similar in my own country: former witty, extremely-clever-but-cynical outlets have changed to a more neutral style in recent years. I do think this is an obvious win for journalism, or at least for investigative reporting. They can possibly dig a little deeper this way. More focus on the hard work of bringing serious problems to light, less focus on crafting mean headlines.

Also, as a side note, I'd say it is actually much easier to write a "cynical" headline as compared to one that is not mean, but still playful and multi-layered. IMO cynicism is mostly a low-hanging fruit; which is why this is such a common "closet addiction" in many newsrooms.

Which is why Private Eye is so popular and has record sales figures!

(Hint: It remains as British and as cynical as ever)

But the sad thing it's Barrapunto is not more since a decade (they plugged the servers down a few years ago) and Meneame took its position, and politic arguments took over the "geeky" environment.

I miss these days, I could learn geeky and tech stuff in both languages and chat with geniouses daily. Reddit did the same for Slashdot, ok, but you kept Slashdot on.

Here, in the Spanish world (not even the whole Hispanic world across th pond) the legacy tech sites are dead, even for the Usenet es.* and esp.* (for latam hiers) . You have Slashdot at least, Ars Technica, Usenet, IRC and even Fido/Dovenet.

This is like being a curry shop known for having intensely flavorful but spicy curry - thus having dedicated fans who enjoy that flavor - and toning it down in flavor and spice because you want to have more general appeal. Now nobody thinks of you as "that shop with the intense curry" but just one of many curry shops.

Now you're just like every other shitty tech news website and competing for the same generic eyeballs who will read a story from you that happens to appear in google news and never come back.

Now they are a spammy lowest-common-denominator pop culture “tech news” and cell phone reviews.

Now I understand why it has not captured my attention in these last years: I checked the homepage and the titles are pretty vanilla, they don't read tongue in cheek not witty, which is something I liked. Nothing wrong with that, I assume the standard editorial style attracts a broader audience.

As a product, I would think that you would survive by finding a niche and expanding it. But these changes seem to try to compete for engagement rather than serve the niche.

Yes, you expand your business and make more money - but I would also think that the competition would be more fierce as a trade off.

Kind of wish it could be a setting "sarcasm on".

It's also very similar to how by a bands second or third album (after they hit it big) - they end up changing their sound (often sounding like every other band in the process) - because they go on tour and then they tailor their music to what makes the crown react more.

You have aggressively used the word "folks" without a license 8)

el Reg has always had a tone and attitude all of its own. Let's face it the forums are pretty functionally crap and yet it sort of works.

Mess with the format at your peril - make the forums/comments work effectively ... that would be nice.

I have no idea why you insist on calling it "the Reg", it's currently "el Reg" due to the Spanish influence unless you can do better ...

Do you remember say "Eadon"? or a Canadian bloke with a decently potty mouth (Trev).

Punny headlines unfortunately are terrible for targeting keywords

This isn't a new thing. When I was an industry analyst we also liked to do clever stuff in titles which at least one editor pushed back on. However, we were mostly a fully paywalled subscription so it was less of a consideration in our case.

Except you're not irreverent at all anymore. You're basically Ars and CNET. Why on earth you'd abandon your readership to attract people who already read Ars, and are unlikely to move, is beyond me.

I like that it (still, despite the insinuation) is a RedTop in spirit, and I am generally quite impressed by the technical level of its staff.

I do like that you have given Dabbsy and Simon a good home. Thanks for that.

Just one drop in the ocean of data, but I'm glad you guys are around.

https://autosaveisforwimps.substack.com

This makes sense. Somewhere I have an old hacker t-shirt that says Evolve or die that supports the mantra.

If I could make one feature request of ElReg it would be that the system used by your editors puts a hard cap on article descriptions to 80 characters so I do not have to do creative editorializing of the links when I submit them here. At times I find it very difficult to submit a link and have it still make sense.

OP here. Just wanted to say thanks a million for taking he time and sharing your insightful reply. I don't have any original/interesting points to make, so I'll let the other commenters follow-up.

Sounds basically like you were left with:

"To Assimilate or To Differentiate? That is The [Business] Question."

(to misquote another great British writer)

That's a shame. I can't stand the smug yet awfully constructed articles. The house style is beyond irritating, and I assumed Andrew orlowski was to blame, but I see he now writes for spiked (enough said) but if the writing style still makes it so hard to read, I'll continue to give it a swerve

Yelling! Yahoo! Headlines! were always easy to parse and will be missed.

Christ mate! Long term El-Reg reader here.

The pure Blightly, homegrown, sarcastic piss taking tone is why I read the Reg, and so do many others. Selling out to some bland US-corporate bullshit WILL loose you readers.

And BTW, can we have the 'Paris' icon back? Please.

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 :)

Anyway

https://www.theonion.com/

https://www.betootaadvocate.com/

Hopefully http://n-gate.com/ gets going again. (Type out the url, he detects HN redirects).

referer actually

I really don't see much of a difference

"Rust never sleeps: C++-alike language tops Stack Overflow survey for fourth year in a row"

The tongue was a bit more in cheek before I guess

I remember them occasionally featuring a fragment of a poem by Alexander Pope:

  "Damn with faint praise, assent with civil leer,
  And without sneering, teach the rest to sneer."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qEV9qoup2mQ

I might also repeat a famous Wilde quote:

There are two ways to dislike poetry. One is to dislike it, and the other is to read Pope.

Once of the only reasons to visit them nowadays is for the BOFH (new episode every Friday): https://www.theregister.com/offbeat/bofh/

It can be funny but it can also get in the way of serious points you want to make.

When they changed tone i just thought they got bought out and gave up.

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.

See here:

https://web.archive.org/web/20200331234933/https://www.thein...

https://i.imgur.com/hqh9aTe.jpg (shutdown screen)

https://web.archive.org/web/20010405023100/http://www.theinq... (2001)

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,

I would disagree. At least before I would visit it intermittently whenever I remembered it existed. Now I have zero interest in ever visiting it again.

> Now I have zero interest in ever visiting it again.

You barely had any interest in visiting in the first place. You don't build a commercially viable product by catering to people who routinely do not use you.

You can disagree, but again, you didn't visit for years at a time, so it doesn't matter.

For me, a theme that's arising is that the previous style was pretty polarising, but at the same time it was a differentiator. Now, it's neither of those.

It appears that this works better for them commercially, too; so more power to them.

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.

C.

Now if we want to tounge-in-cheek tech humour, we are left with. . . techdirt.com?

The Daily Express is like Fox News.