Yesterday at my office two of my colleagues and I spent a few minutes discussing the new New York Times website. They like it; I don’t.

The argument my colleagues made was that the design is cleaner, less cluttered, airier. One of them (a woman) described it as “more feminine.”

I don’t know about that, but I do have this nagging feeling that there’s less information on it than there used to be, and that the website is moving away from being a reflection of the paper’s actual appearance and front page, and toward something intended to approximate “how people read online,” or some such notion. I myself think that we’re so early in the Internet age that no one can say for sure how people read online, and given that, it’s a shame to throw away something as beautiful as a front page.

Plus, I look at the home page today and see this: Four stories on the left that seem fairly serious—a piece on Chris Christie’s jerkiness, chaos in Iraq, a decision by the private equity firm Black Rock to stop trying to get insider information, and a terrorism disclosure by the government.

I guess those stories are supposed to be important—is that why they’re on the left-hand column—but I miss the placement on the front page metaphor that is intended to convey their importance. Is this new left-hand column now the “hard news” space?

And then, in the middle of the page, I’ve just got a lot of fluff. A piece on pop stars doing reality shows; something about the unstylishness of “tech attire”; a piece about MoMa’s planned expansion; and a book review. Is this the Thursday Style section, front and center?

The right hand column is just, well, dribs and drabs, basically. If there’s an organizing principle to it, it’s not obvious.

The Times has a link touting the virtues of its redesign; there are a couple things that seem useful, like the ability to enlarge a photo without leaving an article you’re reading. But on the whole, it doesn’t exactly make the case for fixing something that, to my mind, wasn’t broken.

And given that the paper is launching the redesign at the same time it’s launching its new and controversial “native advertising”—basically, advertorials written by “journalists” and dressed up to look like articles —it’s hard not to suspect that this redesign is not, as the Times says, “a redesigned web experience with you in mind,” but a redesigned web page with advertisers in mind.

Then again, my younger colleagues say that I just don’t like change, to which I will, occasionally, plead guilty. (In my defense, I embraced color photography when the Times introduced it to much outrage way back when.)

So maybe I will come to see the virtues of this redesign in the next weeks and months.

I don’t know, though—I loved that old concept of the front page translated online and thought it worked well. Is there a better invention than the front page?

And I don’t want a front page that reflects what some algorithm thinks I want to see. I want a front page that reflects the perspective of seasoned and thoughtful editors. I may disagree with it, but it’s more engaging than just having my own biases reflected back at me.

As you can tell, I’m conflicted—and curious: What do you think of the redesign?