I had no idea that TechCrunch content was syndicated to Washington Post, but apparently it is. However, the solution seems a bit broken, just look at the screenshot below:

It is a syndicated version of this post, and the culprit is obviously the formatting of the line-breaked e-mail sent by Jason Calacanis (who incidentally quitted blogging recently), blockquoted in the TechCrunch post.

This is the way it was supposed to look:

Naturally, this is something that needs to be remedied.

I’m constantly surprised on how often content syndication goes astray. Some issues surrounding images are to be expected, after all, if I’ve got a content area that is 600 pixels wide, for instance, and I’m doing graphics to illustrate my content to fit that width, this will look funky in tighter designs. However, the issue described above is text being processed poorly. I think it is the line-breaks that does it, WordPress (which TechCrunch uses) is pretty forgiving when copy-pasting stuff into its interface, and handles line-breaks well enough. Depending on how the content is shipped to Washington Post, this could be an issue.

Syndication gone bad, since the reader won’t know that it looks and plays nicely at its source (being the original TechCrunch post), this gives a negative impression of both Washington Post and the TechCrunch brand.