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.

And for the love of god, please Just Say No to those flashing GIF ads. Crikey!

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.

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.

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…!

That’ll probably start a whole other debate!