The trouble with the Oregonian

I used to be in web publishing, did it for a while, and know a thing or two about the kind of pressure website producers are under. I used to be in journalism, did it for a little less time, and also know a thing or two about the pressures news organizations are under. So when the editor of the local paper wrote a plea for people to please buy her damn paper because local news is worth supporting, I was probably one of the more sympathetic readers in her audience. 

So I wrote her and enumerated a few issues I've got with the O's web operation, which is sort of awful. The lowlights are pretty plain:

• Lots of low-value, but also low cost, churn content. This is a maladaptive SEO strategy: Google created an utterly cruel treadmill dynamic, punishing sites that didn't "stay fresh" so web operations responded with a bunch of churn strategies. Newspapers have always churned a little, but with a kind of public interest focus that is missing today. Old-school churn was arrested records and other court news, or odd little social reporting pieces from stringers. The Oregonian likes weird little articles about "the most expensive homes on the market in Lake Oswego" or "where to watch the season finale of Yellowstone." 
• Clickbait, opaque headlines. Once you see this, you can't unsee it. They hate to tell you anything about a story without trying to squeeze one more click out of you, so the headlines are always vague and seldom tell you anything useful. Some ice cream company just recalled all of its product because of a deadly bacterial contamination? They won't even tell you the manufacturer, because they'd rather have 1000 clicks that leave 900 people irritated that it turned out to be Product A instead of Product B than 100 clicks from owners of Product A who just want to know what to do next. 
• Oh my god, those ads. I'm gonna break list format here:

Years and years ago I was the technology director of a web publishing company. We were going broke because our business model sucked, so management went out and found one of those ad plays that inserts "relevant" articles in your content as "related stories." There was a mix of your actual content, plus stuff they deemed relevant from other sites.

We hooked up the demo and it was pretty bad. Yes, it pulled in some of our content and was right in a very "ten-year-old kid is given a list of keywords" sort of way, but the off-site content was amazingly irrelevant and sometimes skeevy, like you see in the Oregonian: "Find mature women in your neighborhood," and "five doctors say this will clear your colon like nothing else," and "Oregonians fear this one traffic law" garbage.

I complained to the account executive we were working with, and she said "the relevance is from your own web footprint, so I'm sorry if you think it's gross but it's the kind of stuff you look at." Except, you know, it wasn't. It told me those people were cynical scumbags. Management made us do business with them, though, and it was as bad as you'd expect. Discrediting.

Well, the O works with one of those outfits, and the ads are terrible, and when you click one of the deliberately obscure and unhelpful headlines, it's so they can make you see one of those appalling ads.

What it adds up to, and this is me as someone who was good at journalism and then good at web publishing, is the stink of failure. I was nicer about it to the editor, but it just is what it is.

I did get a response, and she didn't much care, which also rang a bell: "I just handle content," she said, the rest is the responsibility of the web team. It's a bummer of an answer, and I felt bad for her because I was also held captive by shitty web developers who in turn are held captive by "the business side."

I really want the Oregonian to do well. I disagree with its editorial politics, but its local news coverage is relatively balanced. I say that as someone with a front row seat to one of the larger local hot-buttons: homelessness. Willamette Week isn't bad. OPB has picked a side in the county/city dispute over the matter and I don't trust its primary correspondent because when I can fact-check her with someone who has been working in and around the problem for 25 years I can spot the ideological blinders. The Mercury is a take factory.   

But the Oregonian has decided to wrap its local journalism in the turd that is its website, and covers that journalism up with garbage filler and seven or eight advice columnists. So I don't think I'm going to subscribe anymore.