Hurdles on the way to the news

BOSTON.COM, the Globe's main website, has become a mélange of creativity in its first decade of operation.

It has found many novel ways to display and share news and information with readers around the world. The website has also found creative ways to present advertising that appears on screen.

Sometimes, that's a problem.

Some readers have complained that ads have popped up in some inappropriate places, superimposed over stories about tragedies and even over obituaries.

''It is bad enough to look up the death of a beloved one, but then to have to shut down a pop-up ad beforehand," Steven Amari wrote last month from Chicago.

As of this month, the website will no longer run pop-up ads over obituaries.

But a few readers were bothered again last week by another pop-up ad that appeared on Boston.com for a local tire company. The animated pop-up showed a bat hitting a baseball that appeared to ''crack" the screen -- a well-timed ad commemorating baseball season's Opening Day.

Richard Gair, general manager for Boston.com, said the ad was immediately suspended on Monday after the website began reporting breaking news bulletins about the collapse of a building scaffold in the Back Bay section of Boston that killed three people.

However, a few other readers and I noticed that the ad reappeared over the scaffolding news story on Tuesday morning before finally being removed.

I recognize that news organizations face intense pressures to find and maximize new ways to attract advertising dollars, and Boston.com has been one of the most successful ventures of its kind -- both among viewers and advertisers. But ads that interrupt a reader's attempts to see a story or column, or risk distorting the tone of a piece can also hurt a person's trust in the organization.

The ideal solution would be to keep such ads off all news and opinion pieces and leave them on other features of Boston.com. (Full disclosure: My wife used to be a Globe advertising executive and we argued over this topic frequently).

If that's not financially possible, then at minimum there should be a more stringent system of filters put in place to keep the ads from popping up where they don't belong.

Several readers have contacted the Globe over the last several weeks to complain about curling -- not the winter sport, but the actual newsprint rolling up from the edges.

''No sooner is the paper out of the plastic bag it is delivered in, it does its best imitation of the Dead Sea scrolls," wrote Jeff Seifert of Medford.

''The individual pages curl when you lay the paper out and try to read it," noted Gail Long, another reader who works in Boston. ''This can be quite annoying if you are trying to read an article and the paper curls over it."

Globe production chiefs said they are aware of the problem, which seems to be related to the slightly thinner newsprint that the Globe and many other newspapers have recently begun using.

There could be many reasons for the curling, according to Luis Azeredo, the Globe's executive director of production. Among the possibilities: The thinner newsprint may be drying out more during the time it takes to get from three Canadian mills to the Globe's warehouses (up to two weeks by rail); the combination of ink and water used to print the paper may need adjusting; the rolls of newsprint may need a different kind of wrapping to lock in more moisture.

The curling seemed to be most prevalent during the dry winter months.

Gregory Thornton, the Globe's senior vice president for employee relations and operations, said one important step is to identify which mill is producing the offending newsprint.

''Once we can identify which mill the newsprint comes from, we can work to fix the problem," Thornton said last week. ''It would be great if readers could help us track down which print is curling."

Here's how: If your newspaper is curling, you can identify which press the paper comes from by finding the single letter that appears on the top of the op-ed page; then check how many stars appear on the top left corner of the front page.

Readers can e-mail that information to prodquality@globe.com, or you can leave a voice mail message for the production department at (617) 929-3353.

From that, Globe production officials say they can track down the mill that is producing the newsprint and work to straighten out the curls.

The ombudsman represents the readers. His opinions and conclusions are his own. Phone 617-929-3020 or, to leave a message, 929-3022. His e-mail address is ombud@globe.com.