Introducing the New Spite
New graphics. Better layout. Now updated every Tuesday.

It became clear that it was time for a change.

Spite was fast approaching its first anniversary. And the staff had grown weary of the old layout. The white backgrounds bored us, and the stolen art embarrassed us.

We decided it was time to shake things up. We peppered our readers with questions: What can we do to improve this mag? How can we entertain you more? What is Spite missing? The answer was a resounding: "We don't care."

But we changed everything anyway, bringing what you see today: the new Spite.

First of all, we changed all the art. Brightly-colored backgrounds. A Jetson's-style logo. That cartoon guy hanging around on nearly every page.

We realize that our core audience, with their cult-like ability to check in nearly every month, might be jarred by the change. Claire, for her part, was a tad upset, to say the least. We say to her and them: give this a chance. The new Spite might be a shocking difference from the previous format, but we also find it cleaner, and easier to navigate. Hopefully, you'll all let us know what you think.

By the way, clicking on the guy or the logo anywhere in the mag will bring you to the front page of Spite.

Second, in a desperate attempt to look make our archives look bigger, we have divided Spite into five sections:

• The Bile Cabinet: This is most of the old stuff. Tidy packages of hate.
• 500 Words: Rambling, hopefully irrational diatribes. These used to be called rants, but that got old.
• Hate Mail: Letters from the obsessed (you) to the needy (us).
• Post Mortem: The Spite message board. You "post" a message, get it?
• About Spite: A mission statement, list of the people responsible and other historical information.

Finally, we decided to begin updating the mag ONCE A WEEK! Starting today, we will publish every Tuesday, come hell or high water. Well, maybe not high water. But come a need for sleep or more attention to loved ones -- we'll still get this damn magazine updated every lousy Monday night.

How, you ask, will Spite go from publishing every month (kinda, sorta) to every week? Simple: We have lowered our standards. Drastically. Seriously, we'll publish anything.

To start with, we have the return of the much-missed STADLEY ROUGH with his lacerating piece "Save Basketball: Ban Patrick Ewing" as well as a protest of the redesign by the woman who dreamed this gig up: Claire Delaware. It's a bit embarrassing to put up a criticism of a new layout on the same day as the layout itself, but that's just how committed we are to getting new material to you!

(Incidentally, old articles remain in their old format. This was done out of loyalty to all the hard work that was done on the original pieces, in addition to an intractable laziness on the part of the editors.)

Finally, we offer a genuine thank-you to Paolo Chiaravalli, Spite's graphic artist. In a deal with his web-design company, Obj-X, he basically revamped the entire site, and did anything graphically in here which looks good, in exchange for a free edition of Photoshop from us. We lied about having that software, Paolo, but we want to thank you here for your work, anyway.

Enough blathering. I've got to get to work on next week's article: What I Watched On TV Today.

Will Hines
Editor, Spite Magazine
November 18, 1997