OK, let's talk about the new, lousy Oregonian

Kari Chisholm

Last week, a bunch of things happened all at once. The federal government shut down. The Oregon Legislature went two days into special session overtime. And the Oregonian threw the switch on its new business model -- with home delivery just four days a week and a new porn site. And because those first two things matter more, we've not yet talked about the Oregonian. Let's do that now.

OK, it's not a porn site. It's just a lousy new "digital" version of the newspaper that makes it clear that the Oregonian thinks the point of journalism is to stuff those empty spaces around half-page mattress ads. It just has a porn site name.

Just hours after the announcement of the new direction in June, we were told that they were dumping the porn-ish name. Publisher N. Christian Anderson clearly said on OPB's Think Out Loud, "It's not going to stay that way." And WW noted:

The Oregonian has not announced what its new subscription rate will be, but Anderson has already reversed one change: The new online paper will not be called MyDigitalO, a name that quickly generated laughter about the unintended sexual connotation.

Of course, there's one more really big change that the Oregonian doesn't want us to pay attention to. As of last week, subscribers will only receive four newspapers delivered each week (er, three papers + a "bonus edition" on Saturday, whatever that means.)

But the Oregonian hasn't changed its pricing. In other words, subscribers that have paid for seven daily newspapers are now getting four daily newspapers. No matter how you cut it, that's a price increase.

Peter Bhatia, the editor of the Oregonian, wrote a column called "Answers to questions on The Oregonian post-Oct. 1". But he completely ignored the pricing question, despite repeated attempts by readers to ask it all over their website. When pressed on it in the comments to his column, he replied, "I can't answer circulation and pricing questions."

The Oregonian's FAQ page still says today, "We are reviewing the pricing and subscription details for deliveries after October 1 and will provide more information once finalized."

Counting Sunday as twice the value of a daily paper, the new model just delivers 62.5% of the newspapers for the same price as before. It seems pretty clear that the O is just clapping their hands over their ears and yelling "lalalalala" until subscribers give up and stop asking this question.

But there's no more succinct discussion of how lousy the new O is than the Mercury's Alex Falcone, who asks, "Why Does the Oregonian's Digital-First Strategy Suck So Much?" Here's just one bit:

But even if you can convince yourself [MyDigitalO is] 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.

And that's just the third-best part of Alex's take.

So, now that we've had just over a week, what do you think?

Will the O be able to survive the digital disaster that they've created? Is anything going right? What's making you crazy? And has the market opened up for another paper to go daily in Portland -- the Tribune, the Register-Guard or the Columbian?

By Kari Chisholm Oct. 11, 2013