Yes, the long-awaited redesign of OregonLive went live a few days ago. And in true ‘three steps forward, one step backwards’ fashion, everyone seems to have something to say about the colors, the fonts, the shadows, or the overwhelming ten pounds of linked content still crammed in the same five pound bag.
I could go there as well – but I won’t. Instead, I want to focus on the troubling ‘we are STILL the Great and Powerful Oz’ attitude that’s lurking behind the curtain – an attitude that’s been there at O-Live all along.
How would I know this? I used to work at O-Live back in the day – in fact, I came to PDX as O-Live’s founding editor (still have a custom Oregon license plate proclaiming my loyalty buried in a box somewhere in my basement, in fact.) And I wanted to push the people at O-Live out there on the site itself, whether in a masthead, in the comments, in the forums, or elsewhere. Sure, the people at The Oregonian should have a presence on the site as well (and over time, they’ve become much more involved in the day-to-day dialog, mostly through blogging.) But the higher-ups at Advance Internet nixed putting a human face and presence on O-Live for their own reasons at the time.
And they’ve never reconsidered that approach – even as other corporate entities have learned that actually getting out there and talking to us unwashed masses reaps huge rewards. How can I tell?
Look at how O-Live’s plastered the word ‘interact’ all over the site. You’ll find it in their new mission statement – “Oregon’s leading Web site for news, information and community interaction.” You’ll find it as a section head on the home page. But you never get the sense that they’re going to actually ‘interact’ with the people pulling the strings – and nowhere is that made more apparent when I stumbled on a random feedback form (which, of course, I now cannot find) and see this headline on the page: Contact Interactivity Management. Interactivity Management? Really? Not just a plain folks ‘Contact Us?’
Even Sprint gives me half-assed warm and fuzzies by telling me that my Indian representative “Linus” was happy to talk to me on the phone earlier today in a follow-up email – even though I know they’re putting on the faux-personal touch, even though I don’t buy for a minute that his name is actually “Linus.”
You can see other examples of this stilted hands-off approach littering the site: ‘User Generated Content’, or the overuse of the word ‘management’ – whether it’s someone managing the privacy policy, managing the forums, or managing interactivity. I could only see evidence of one O-Live employee referenced by name – Jennifer Cline (who I hired as an intern way back in the day – hi, Jenny!)
That’s a mistake, in my opinion. See, the only reason I’m still subscribing to The Oregonian these days is to keep the people I know and like via other social networks (Steve Woodward and Mark Friesen, I’m talking about you!) gainfully employed. And I have no interest in ‘interacting’ over on O-Live – instead, I have the feeling that my ‘interactions’ are used primarily to boost someone’s stats count rather than a sincere desire to listen to what I have to say. And I don’t much like the feeling that I’m being jerked around by invisible strings to provide amusement for the crowds.
At the end of the day, I don’t want to ‘interact.’ I want to talk. To real live people – people I know (or want to know), people I can see, people who are genuine.
What do you think? Am I making a mountain out of a molehill? Am I too close to the subject to be objective? Or am I on to something here?
{ 32 comments }
This is a timely post for me. Just a couple of days ago, I noticed that I got a couple of hits from this page: http://www.oregonlive.com/blogs/
I’d never seen the page before, and was surprised to find tons of links to local blogs. I searched for the link to my blog but I couldn’t find it. I assume I got the hits from the Reddit widget at the top of the page (since I had submitted a post that day).
From there, I started to wonder how I could get my blog linked under “AROUND THE WEB.” I can’t figure it out. It would be cool if they were more transparent about whether I can submit my blog for consideration.
Wow … I worked at The O for five years and we never had a clue that there were such things as O-Live employees west of the Mississippi. Where the heck were you, Betsy? I could have used some help every time a reader picked my e-mail address to ask how to find something on the site — since I mostly didn’t know, myself.
But I’m with you — the point of the Net is the people on the other end.
Hi Betsy.
Don’t forget: Oregonian subscriptions make great holiday gifts, too.
The “Contact interactivity management”> link appears as boilerplate at the bottom of most OregonLive.com”> pages. The link takes you to a page with an intimating array of options for interacting with the Interactivity Powers That Be:
“Click one of the links below that best describes your question or concern.
“• For inquiries about your current communities account
“• For inquiries about one of our communities
“• For all other community-related comments or questions
“• Contact OregonLive.com or its affiliated newspapers about other issues”
Those links, in turn, take you to fill-in-the-blank e-mail forms. It’s admittedly bureaucratic, confusing and user-unfriendly. But I’m not convinced it’s hubris so much as a large institution feeling its way in a strange, new world. The good news, I would suggest, is that O-live seems to understand it has to remake the site into a two-way conversation with readers. I think it’s a work in progress.
One of the best examples of an OregonLive blogger who gets it is Big O reporter Shelby Wood, who writes the PDXgreen blog. She crams her posts with useful links, engages readers in the comments section and even asks readers to participate in short polls about current environmental issues.
So while you’re waiting for that return e-mail from Interactivity Management (whoever they are), think good thoughts about the journalists who really do want to talk with you, now that the tools are finally becoming available. And in the meantime, don’t forget to renew your subscription.
Steve
(The thoughts expressed above are definitely my own and don’t necessarily represent the views of my employer.)
Suzii, I left just under 10 years ago – but I’d have been more than happy to help had I still been there!
I have to admit that I got a chuckle out of the invitation I got a few years back to blog for O-Live for free, though (I respectfully declined the offer…)
Steve – HA! I’m on the perma-renew auto-deduction, no worries. Even though the papers pile up unread on the front porch, ugh.
I will take your word that a fresh new breeze is blowing through the O-Live offices, and that true interactivity is forthcoming.
Thanks for dropping by to continue the conversation…
Until it has a reliable free archive of older O stories on it, O-Live is doomed to mediocrity. And it’s probably too late for it to get the “interactivity” religion now — that is so 2004. If people want real interactivity, that site is waaaaay down the list.
The site is still poorly organized, now in a different way. The search function appears to be working better. Jack, the Multnomah County library’s site has a good working database with all ‘Oregonian’ articles (not syndicated) back to 1988. Prior to 1988 your on your own with the microfilm at PSU or Central Branch. (The NY Times have all articles clipped, keyword sorted, and PDF’ed on their library accessible database, going back to the turn of the last century).
What’s surprising to me is how many hits the O-Live site gets. Yes, it has a big promotion budget, but still it seems a great opportunity for an upstart to capture lots of eyeballs. Probably not with paper tho, considering how the Trib is tanking. And not with the local TVs and radios, their sites + news reporting sucks.
O-Live’s problem has always been, and still is that it is impossible to find anything. If I see an article in the dead-tree edition and want to e-mail it to my friend in South Carolina it takes a graduate degree in library science to search for and find it. Seriously, the article that was on the contestants from the Amazing Race that were from Eugene – splashed on the front page of the mid-day edition – nowhere to be found on O-live. The new version does nothing to help.
As to “interactivity,” who cares? I have no interest in interacting with writers from the Oregonian, web-monkeys at O-Live, and certainly not with anybody that routinely comments on the site. If I wanted to interact, I would look for sites that provide the type of content that I am interested in. For craft beer discussion, I am going to go to Beervana. For outdoors & fishing I am going to go to Westfly. O-live needs to get over the idea that they can be the one-stop-shopping place for PDX. Their advantage in the marketplace is their exclusive (semi) source of Oregonian news articles. Do that right and people will come to the site.
@Steve Woodward – I got about 5 lines into that and my eyes started to glaze over. If it is that draconian just to contact Oregonlive then there is no other way to say it – the design of that site is horrible!
@jfwells – Just out of curioity, what do you think of the idea of readers making assignments via OregonLive? In other words, readers would tell us (The Oregonian) what topics they want us to explain or investigate. For example, readers could vote on topics such as the Columbia River Crossing, the club scene, the job market, city government or any other topic they deem worthy. Readers and reporters could use the comments sections to elaborate and refine the focus of the assignment. In this case, interactivity would be used for a journalistic purpose, rather than interactivity for interactivity’s sake.
By the way, you should add John Foyston’s “The Beer Here” blog to your RSS reader, if it isn’t already. Although the blog is hard to find on OregonLive, it appears on many local blogrolls. John is the furthest thing from a corporate blogger that you’ll find — a big, burly, beer-swilling, suspender-and-jeans-wearing, Canadian-American ex-motorcycle repairman who writes some of the sweetest prose in the newspaper business. (Sorry for the advertisement. I just love the guy.)
@Steve Woodward – Steve, I do read John Foyston’s blog, as well as Stuart Tomlinson’s weather blog although he doesn’t post nearly as much as I would like. There definitely are some good writers & bloggers at the O. The problem is that O-live is nearly un-usable. Not too interested in having much more interaction if I can’t even find the stories that I am looking for in the first place. Shouldn’t they be able to do their primary job well first: disseminate news?
Regarding the readers making assignments, I worry about what would get left behind if it was up to the masses to decide what was newsworthy. I mean really, would there be enough people logging on to the internet to tell you, “I want you to really show the Dikensian nature of homelessness,” to ever get someone out there spending a night under a bridge to get a good story?
@jfwells – Believe me, there isn’t a reporter or editor at The O who hasn’t heard complaints like yours for years. Unfortunately, I’m just an ink-stained wretch who has nothing to do with O-live. But I know their higher-ups and our higher-ups really have been trying to solve the problems you describe. I wish them godspeed, since I have trouble finding my own stories on the site.
Re: readers making assignments. Don’t sell “the masses” short. I’ve been taking reader calls for 30 years, and I’m always amazed at how intelligent and thoughtful they are as a group. I’m a great believer in the wisdom of crowds. I think if the paper presented homelessness as an option for an investigation, the topic would rank high with a Portland audience. I once pitched the idea of living in Dignity Village for a week, but it didn’t go anywhere. At this point, the paper is far from ready to let the audience assign stories, but I’d do it in a heartbeat if it were up to me.
A fellow fan of “The Wire”? *sigh* I miss that show…
Wait a second. I thought OurPDX was “Oregon’s leading Web site for news, information and community interaction”?
In my dreams, maybe! But thanks for the warm and fuzzies…
The biggest, most aching problem with OregonLive isn’t OregonLive, it’s the failure of the Oregonian to have a wake up to the 21st Century and put up a usable newspaper website. Go to http://www.oregonlive.com/oregonian/ and you’ll find only a few of the day’s Oregonian’s print edition’s news. Instead of one page listing ALL the day’s news stories, section by section, we have only some of them, mixed in together with older stories, blogs, links to columnists, etc. I’m not saying OregonLive shouldn’t have that extra content, but I am saying that any newspaper website should have ALL of the current day’s news laid out where the eye can quickly and easily find it.
Right now I’m looking at the Oregonian page (see above), and I see zero stories in the Living section. Ah, you caught that it’s no longer called “Living” in the print O, but here it’s still Living. With no stories. No comics. No puzzles.
The recent improvements to OregonLive are good (especially including many more photos), but they’re still too little and WAY too long in coming. Take a look at the online editions of Seattle’s two papers – both of them are far more usable than the newspaper function of OregonLive.
@Steve “…strange, new world” you say? Uh, if the internet in 2008 is still strange or new to anyone, they have problems (duh, that’s the whole point!).
I agree with most of the criticism above so I wont repeat it. But I will offer some compliments:
Steve, I read sections outside of Business only when looking for your work. I like that you have become part of the online world and am thus interested in what you do. Why can’t more journalist do the same?
I’ve spent more time on the O-Live web site now than ever before for 1 reason: twitter. I started following @Oregonian and now find myself on the (terrible) site frequently. Great move for them to start tweeting, honestly.
So its like the O kinds gets it, but kinda not. No excuses at this point, as far as I am concerned.
@Paul Bingman – I can’t and won’t argue with many of the criticisms that have been leveled at O-live and The Dead Tree O. The Seattle papers control their own sites, as do most papers in the U.S. The O does not. The newspaper operates pretty much autonomously, but Advance Internet sites such as O-live are controlled centrally from New Jersey. As a result, O-live can be described as a Web site featuring original content, plus content from The O and the Hillsboro Argus. The O does control increasing amounts of the content, but that split leads to some of the inconsistencies you point out.
The combined site(s) still organize much of the content according to our internal newsroom structure rather than the way readers logically try to access the information. For instance, articles that ran in the Metro print section will sometimes show up under O-live’s Living tab, simply because the writer works on the How We Live team. Or a story that ran in How We Live is hidden under O-live’s Entertainment tab for similar reasons. As I said in a previous comment, it’s a work in progress. I just wish it would progress more quickly.
I think tons of legitimate — and helpful — criticisms have been raised in this thread, for which I commend you. But please bear in mind that I’m speaking on my own behalf and that I can’t speak for either The O or O-live.
@Jmartens – Thanks for the shout-out, Jeff. Personally, I don’t understand how you can be a journalist these days and *not* take advantage of social media. Over the decades, we adjusted to the telegraph, the telephone, radio and TV. In fact, we turned those technologies to our advantage.
So why is it so hard for us to adjust to the Internet? Certainly, the pace of change is exponentially faster than anything that came before. But that’s not the entire reason. I think it has to do with a fundamental change in the nature of information. Before the Internet, information was scarce; journalists used technology to control and distribute scarce information. Now, thanks to the Internet, information is abundant. But journalists continue to try to control and distribute information as though it’s still scarce. It’s not. People are inundated with information; they have too much. The journalist’s role must be to become a filter to help people sort and find reliable, relevant information — and to produce it when none exists. That’s an entirely different job — kind of a Google in reverse.
That, I believe, is why the world looks so strange and new to journalists. Because it is.
Steve, that’s beautiful. And exactly right. I think. Assuming my brain can wrap itself around a reverse-Google…
@Steve Woodward –
Great assesment, you are totally right.
However, you defend the world of newspapers like they are the only industry that has been rocked by the internet. Every industry has had to adjust, some well and others not so well.
In fact, how many industries are better off as a whole now, because of the internet, because the status-quo had to change, because it was eat or be eaten?
Retailers are thriving, artists are embracing the new world, even government is improving because of this strange, new world.
Why are newspapers any exception? Are they ’special’, do should they get a pass?
@Jmartens – Agreed. I focused on newspapers because the discussion thread was about O-live and I happen to be thinking a LOT about the future of newspapers right now. But you’re right. The Internet has changed the game for everyone. In fact, I can’t think of a single industry that has been affected. Well, maybe blacksmithing…
Just wanted to clarify that in my mind, O-Live and The Oregonian are one in the same.
That’ll probably start a whole other debate!
I meant to say a single industry that HASN’T been affected.
Actually, that’s the problem in a nutshell: OregonLive and The Oregonian aren’t the same. Two different companies. Two different staffs (back in the day, newspaper people weren’t supposed to even talk to O-Live people, and vice-versa, for example.) Two related – but different – online agendas.
I thought at the time when I came here 10 years ago that segmenting the online operation out from the print paper made sense on a bunch of different levels. I was wrong – on a bunch of different levels. And 10 years later, it’s clear to me that the bastardized hybrid model just isn’t working.
There are always people who will be disappointed that OregonLive isn’t an online newspaper, and angry that they can’t find everything in the print version online as well. Still others will get annoyed at having to wade through those pesky newspaper articles to get at the stuff they’re really interested in.
Sure, it’s clearly working well for some people – and they’re the silent majority that will never call The O to thank the carrier for getting the paper on the front porch by 6 am every morning. They’re also not going to jump in and add positive comments to a blog post like this one, either. The rest of us? We’re the loud, vocal minority – using O-Live for what we can while bitching every step of the way.
But I also have to say this: right now, the OregonLive site (thanks to Reddit) is the single biggest referrer into OurPDX. Bigger than ORBlogs, bigger than Twitter – in fact, it’s tossing far more people our way than even Bojack does…!
Thanks for this post, and the illuminating comments. Honestly I didn’t even know that O Live had changed format, because I frankly will use just about anything else to find information. I think the only resources that are worse are the online yellow pages directories. Love the “10 pounds of information” phrase. Exactly.
BUT, in fairness, I didn’t know that the Oregonian and O-Live were separate entities, and that explains a whole hell of a lot. The reader’s digest approach to news on O-Live was a gigantic turnoff to me; I am a subscriber to the dead tree delivery service, and I often found articles or photos in the paper that I wanted to share with friends, only to give up quickly when it wasn’t on O-Live. My assumption, obviously unfairly, was that it was yet another case of the Clueless Online Oregonian organization missing the boat, yet again.
For this assumption, I apologize.
Thanks Steve and Betsy for the clarification.
However, I still agree with Paul above – get the frickin’ paper online, under the paper’s control. Change your revenue model. Survive. It’s what everyone is doing these days. Quit making excuses and buck up.
Oh, and one more thing – Steve: http://www.blacksmithsjournal.com/top/
It almost doesn’t even matter if the O and O-Live are or aren’t the same entity: in the eyes of readers they are. They have positioned themselves as one in the same. So no matter what anyone says about them being seperate, they are one to the consumer.
If I were the Oregonian, I’d dump O-Live faster than you can say “strange, new world”. they’d have nothing without the O’s content.
@Metroknow – Love the blacksmith link. Shoulda known someone would call me out on it as soon as I wrote it. Sorry, all you blacksmiths!
This is a major leap forward. Their design has gone from being 15 years out of date to more like five years out of date now.
And for the love of god, please Just Say No to those flashing GIF ads. Crikey!
@rich brueckner – Just install FireFox’s Adblock addon. No more ads!
Putting in a comment a little late on this discussion because I couldn’t convince myself to go look at the “new” OregonLive — now that I have I’ll continue avoiding it. Objectively perhaps it’s a little better, but I still find it a maddening place to try to find anything — even with a degree in library science. Every time I need to do research on something that “may” have been in The Oregonian, I look everywhere else there is to look first.
I do subscribe (still) to the print version of The O because I like newspapers — but I wouldn’t go to O-Live every day — there are better ways to raise my blood pressure.
“Interact” is just not a label I want to click on. It also appears that this redesign is not specific to O-Live. I was poking around in the breaking news section and ended up on the site for the Times-Picayune which looks exactly like O-Live, including the Interact tab. http://www.nola.com/ Owned by the same company I assume.
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