By BILL WYMAN

Last summer Wired magazine ran a cover story on Craigslist, the classified-advertising Web site, and its founder, Craig Newmark. Craigslist, the headline read, was a mess. The story said the site was underdeveloped. It refused to monetize itself. Mr. Newmark wouldn't add new features, and his motivations were obscure.

Indeed, so poorly is Craigslist run that it's easily one of the 20 biggest Web sites in the U.S. and, according to Wired, likely topped $100 million in revenue last year. It did this with minimal effort and with a staff an order of magnitude or two smaller than those of other sites its size. Those are two things that can not be said about most Web sites in the U.S., and certainly not about the New York Times, which announced last month it would be shifting its Web operation to a modified pay set-up in 2011.

The details are as yet sketchy, but the paper plans to adopt a metered model. Subscribers—daily or Sunday—get everything. Nonsubscribers get to see a few articles every month; after that, they will be invited to pay some sort of fee. The move is designed to take advantage of the traffic that search engines bring to the site, but still target the moochers.

The Times has invested heavily in the Web. You can't accuse it of not taking the medium seriously. Unlike Craigslist it highly monetizes its Web site, makes a hefty amount from it, and deserves to do whatever it wants to make money to support its extensive news operation. Indeed, the move makes terrestrial subscriptions more valuable—a smart way to maximize that revenue stream.

That said, let's remember that the road to charging for content on the Internet is strewn with media roadkill, including the Times's short-lived TimesSelect experiment, which launched in 2005 and folded in 2007.

With all humility toward the very smart people at the Times, I submit that they can learn a thing or two from the lowly Craigslist. Indeed, I submit that it's hard to look at virtually any news site out there and not notice how its architecture and presentation differ from that of Craigslist, which has several times any news site's number of users.

Craig Newmark did one simple thing: He thought about what his users wanted, and put very little on his site that wasn't useful to them. Craigslist's mission is merely to make it easy for people to sell an old refrigerator, or look for a roommate, or find someone to date. By just about any metric the site serves those users as well as any business on the Internet, with the arguable exception of Google.

For decades, newspapers made billions in profits by tending their local monopolies and felt quite important in the process. So it's not surprising that the single most salient weakness of a mainstream news site is that in the end it is a corporate showcase, a striking contrast to the Craigslist model. The vocabulary of the architecture speaks plainly that the page is there to serve not readers, but to articulate the structure of the company behind it.

That architecture is depressingly similar. The typical news site doesn't take advantage of the wide horizontal window of the browser. Instead, it is framed inside a square or vertical box. And inside that frame, the reader is presented with four or five—and sometimes even seven or eight—horizontal lines of information or navigation before the first actual story headline appears. (The Wall Street Journal site, which, it should be noted, has never given away its content for free, has more than a half-dozen lines of foofaraw before a reader is granted a story headline.)

The stories are as a rule stuffed into a cramped space in the bottom middle of the page, hemmed in by myriad other links, devices and widgets arrayed in columns to either side. Headlines, forced to fit in those tiny spaces, are often as awkward and telegrammatic as print ones.

Even after the reader clicks on a story, the site then offers up more of the same: A frame inside the browser window, unwanted navigation elements, links to any and every possible department of the site, placed above, to the left and to the right of the actual prose. As for that prose, it could be a 400-word reported piece, a lacerating editorial, or a recipe for pumpkin pie. It doesn't matter—it will always be trapped in that small well, suffocated by the weight of the widgets, links and navigation around it.

I'm not talking about ads. It is a cranky consumer who can't grok the reason for an ad next to a story. I think many readers, like me, would gladly swap their prized Adblock Firefox add-on for one that would keep the ads and instead eliminate all the non-content elements of the average newspaper Web page.

Ultimately, I would like about 99% fewer navigation links on the page, but will settle for 90% fewer. For that service, a newspaper site can hit me with all the ads it wants, or charge me any amount of money. But until it provides this simple and I think obvious service to readers, one can't help suspecting that a newspaper's approach to the Web is incomplete.

Newspaper folks, looking at their collapsed business model, have griped for a decade that Craigslist stole their classified ads—and a breath later dream about charging for content. They do everything but consider that a Craigslist model—which puts the reader first, highlights the presentation of information, and fosters community—might indeed fund newsgathering for a new millennium.

Mr. Wyman is the former arts editor of Salon.com and National Public Radio.