If you're okay with more of a microfiche-style experience:

https://www.pressreader.com/

Not sure if you can kill photos— but they're pretty essential to journalism.

My point is countless hours of dev time, resources and infrastructure is wasted on what is obviously a very bad design.

Making a bad design, then overcoming the bad design with another piece of software is pure wastage of valuable resources.

It's really sad. UX design does not get the authority it deserves.

Some publishers do better than others in that department. I can agree (from experience) that many run fast away from any dev work except for new plugins that return more data to the marketing and sales departments who come back with more requests for beating as blockers and direct ad insertion and the rest of it. It was very frustrating being somebody who knew how to build a better experience and see it rejected as bad business.

Edit: they have UX teams but they don’t leverage them because of a goofy allotment of any sanctioned development work to CAPEX which they never want to spend because they often have little of that but tons of OPEX. It drives the “just get it done” part of my mind crazy.

I like the sound of this but then I visited and my scrolling got jacked. Sideways. Infinitely. And an animated sidebar started appearing and disappearing, hiding and revealing sections, unloading and reloading them.

It was like using a microfiche while large boxes of whistles and bells were dropped on me from above.

So much effort to make a familiar, working UI feel clunky and uncomfortable.

I can understand the frustrations at the ads after I said it was like reading microfiche...

but the scrolling is like reading library microfiche.

That left bar could use some work for sure though.

Safari on mobile supports defaulting to Reading Mode for domains.

I've recently disabled javascript by default and now I only enable it for sites where I want it. My browsing experience has improved significantly.