Well, this is lame.

Secretary of State Mary Herrera's office has replaced what used to be a fully searchable, hyperlinked directory of registered New Mexico lobbyists with a few massive, not-at-all searchable PDF files. Here's the state's much less user-friendly lobbyist information page.

This shows severe tone-deafness, given the current discussion over government openness at the state level. It's also out of step with the times, given Obama's push for online openness.

True, the presentation of the state lobbyist directory doesn't matter directly to 99.98 percent of New Mexico's population. But the other .02 percent is comprised of the lobbyists themselves, the interests they represent, the politicians who take their cash and the reporters (and other investigators) who try to keep them all honest. So it does matter how this information is presented. A half-assed, 192-page PDF file doesn't hack it, especially when the old directory was far more useful.