It’s important for you to know that none of this is out of malice. My parents met in J school. My dad’s worked for newspapers longer than I’ve been alive. It’s not out of snarkiness that I say any of these things, it’s because I genuinely want the Oregonian to be better, and I’m sad it’s not.
This week was the official start of the Oregonian‘s digital-first strategy announced by they parent company Advance Media back in June. It was such a strange move, since the Oregonian has proven to be good at many things, but digital wasn’t one of them. It was like Trader Joe’s announcing it was going to be an all-produce store.
As expected, it’s not an impressive start. The worst part is, they shouldn’t be bad at digital! Advance Media owns Reddit, Ars Technica, and Wired, among other impressive digital properties. They know how to own websites. So why does OregonLive.com look like it’s aimed for toddlers? Beige with rounded corners as if meant to be the home of generic, inoffensive cartoons. What it lacks in design, it makes up for with horrible pop-ups and a very long treasure hunt called “Find The News.” I want to use it. I want to read the news. It’s just so difficult.
If you go beyond OregonLive, things only get worse. I subscribed to weather e-mail updates for most of the last year and got day-old weather reports more often than not. Tech support told me three different times it was fixed without anything changing, proving that they also couldn’t predict the past.
While they’re cutting back on the thing they do well (printing newspapers and bringing them to people) they’re adding more inept digital features. You can now get a look-alike edition of the paper at MyDigitalO.com. My. Digital. O. Have you guys never seen the Internet? The absolutely first test any product needs to pass is “does it sound like a porn site?” This sounds more like a porn site than Bang Bus, which one could possibly think was about driving to Hammer School.
But even if you can convince yourself it’s okay to click on, you’re rewarded with the paper in the least convenient format I’ve seen for anything on the web. It takes several minutes to load and then appears as if like they e-mailed you a .pdf of the paper but they thought Acrobat looked too nice and was too easy to navigate.
Again, this isn’t malice. I’m just venting frustration because I want so badly for them to do this right. I want them to succeed. Because if they don’t, I’ll have to read Portland Tribune for my hard news.
The good news:
Somehow, against all odds, http://hammerschool.com is available.
While Advance Publicantions owns Reddit, Ars Technica, and Wired, they don’t manage/publish those businesses. Conde Nast publishes Wired and Ars Technica, and other well-functioning businesses and websites. Advance simply bought Reddit – they haven’t done much with it as far as I know.
ALL of the Advance Digital websites are awful. I’ve been pissed off at the oregonlive/oregonian arrangement for way too long. It’s just a terrible operation. Just name your website oregonian.com, and have an in-house website management team. Don’t create separate, confusing, differently-styled entities. I had friends who worked at the O, and they were practically competing with the Oregon Live staff for stories (and the oregon live staff were often not seasoned journalists putting out quality work). What a stupid arrangement!
I thought they abandoned the My Digital O name. Maybe they’re trying to drum up readership by attracting folks looking for porn.
Folks looking for porn who don’t know how to use google and the people who read the Oregonian editorial page are probably the same circle in a Venn diagram.
yeah I can’t believe their website looks like that. the formatting is terrible. I thought it would change when they announced their new strategy. And I dont get the oregonlive/oregonian/mydigitalo naming difficulty either. Its like they are actively trying to fail.
My Digital O O O O (see Office Space Drew).
Yeah, it doesn’t seem THAT hard to have one kick-ass news site on oregonian.com with decent journalists. And no comments. And this shall come to pass WHEN I RULE THE EARTH.
Why Does the Oregonian Suck So Much?
FTFY Alex
Ironic that this occurs during Design Week.
The “O” in the green box of their logo just SCREAMS mid-’90s.
I’ve gone to OregonLive the past couple of days to read the accounts of the Blazers pre-season games. The usual stuff, which is OK. But where is the box score? Not to be found anywhere on The Oregonian site. So if I have to find the box score for a game at ESPN.com, that is just one more reason to ignore the Oregonian.
The Oregonian’s own staff google articles rather than try to find their own stuff on OregonLive. It is so frustrating to type in the actual headline of an article and get zero matches.
The digital is indeed terrible, but let’s also have the conversation about the rapidly declining quality of news and #seriousjournalism they are producing. So much click-bait lately. There’s a twitter account documenting some of it. https://twitter.com/OregonDead