Hey Post.com: Where are my toenails?

This morning a City Paper staffer walked into my office ridiculing this morning’s WaPo Metro feature about toenails. He said it looked like a lame story, typical empty daily feature fare.

I’d read it at breakfast and liked it quite a bit. What I liked more than the story itself was the amazing photo presentation by Sarah L. Voisin. NEVER before has the front of Metro looked so inviting, mold-breaking, and all that other good stuff that design experts talk about at journalism conventions. Whereas the old and tired convention with a toenail-painting story would have been to take a shot or two of a woman getting the nails painted, Voisin, here, just took tons of pictures of painted toenails, and the layout people arranged them like a lei around the story text. It was stunningly good.

But not on the Web, goddamnit! I just spent a good ten minutes on the Post site trying to find the story. Nowhere on the homepage, so I went into the Metro page; I clicked through twice on the Metro “more stories” thingie before giving up. I refused to do a search, because a visual treatment that good shouldn’t have to be fetched online. I also refused to click on the “Day in Photos” box because it fronted a shot of gray horses, not my toenails.

I mean, when you have two boxes on the homepage dedicated to Wall*E and nothing to original content as good as the toenails, someone’s gotta be pissed, even if it’s just me.