Oregonian: a Day Late and a Dollar Short

by Steve, December 13th, 2007

Isn’t it ironic that the Oregonian, whose Web site is the crappiest of all local news outlets, has suddenly discovered (thanks to the folks at Nielsen) that blogging is kind of a big thing in Portland. The front page of today’s living section features a story — yet to be published on the Web, evidently — about how Portland is the #2 bloggingest metro area in the US.

With a cutesy blog style article, complete with comments from Real! Live! Portland Bloggers!, the big O barely scratches the surface. In typical lazy Oregonian style, Steve Woodward did a cursory browse of ORBlogs and didn’t quite mention this blog.

He quotes the blurb on my ORBlogs page (“This may well be he only anti-war hockey blog… in the universe”) without mentioning the title or URL, and lumps me in with sports blogs.

Lordy, I’ve tried to be a sports blogger, but I just don’t have what it takes. All my hockey fan readers have left in droves since I’ve become more about politics than pucks. So it’s obvious that Woodward has no clue that this is one of a small handful of sites where Portland Public Schools policy and politics are discussed with any depth and regularity. The Tribune has pegged me and this blog as “the leading voice for equity issues” at PPS (I don’t think I’m worthy of that, but at least they’ve got the general drift). To the Oregonian I’m a sports blogger.

Most glaringly, there was no mention of Wacky Mommy, the internationally adored blogger I share a bed with.

Naturally, there’s no mention of the Portland Mercury’s very popular, pop culture-saturated Blogtown, or the less popular, more newsy Willamette Week WWire.

The fact that the Oregonian is trying to get current, with their generally irrelevant blogs and Oregon Reddit on oregonlive.com, doesn’t make up for the fact that they have the most outdated, least usable Web site of any local media source. The fact that I can’t even link to the story I’m writing about says it all. Even if it were published on the Web, the link would go dead after a couple weeks, since the O refuses to keep archives online.