Well, The Root‘s been online now for two days, and though I’m not the target audience, I thought I’d go take a look at it.

My first thoughts are that I’m pretty impressed with the look of the thing. It’s supposed to be “Slate for black readers” yet looks nicer than Slate. (I’ve never been impressed with Slate’s weird pop-out Javascript navigation menu.)

I like that the “stuff” in the left column changes–sometimes it’s the top 5 stories, sometimes it’s a list of blogs, sometimes video. But oh–why do the blogs have to look so different? That’s a big negative.

The news content is pulled from other sources on the web, and opinions/blogs are written in-house. It seems to be a good mix of current events and commentary, but after such a short time I can’t be sure.

There are pictures on the Views (opinions) page, but News seems to be devoid of photos. And, come to think of it, why exile blogs to a separate section rather than allow them to mix with Views?

A plus for The Root is it looks like comments can be posted by anyone. And the blogroll to the left is great.

What do y’all think?