Dear Mr. Velveeta
A while back, after meeting you in person, I wrote a blog post that downgraded my disdain for your product from disgust and contempt to mere disliking. I was promptly called onto the carpet by certain luminaries in the Portland blogosphere who shouted me down. "No, no!" they cried. "Nothing less than utter abhhorrence, loathing, and odium is correct. You must hate the Velveeta with all your might!"
I shook my head at these intemperate souls.
Then on Sunday I went about writing a post about the selection of staff members by the new members of the Portland City Council. I recalled reading in the print version of my local newspapers two stories on this subject: one about Sam Adams and the other about Tom Potter. But try and try and try as I might, I could call up on the internet only the story about Adams's staff selection. I had to leave Potter out of my post.
But it troubled me so that I later dug into my recycling pile to see if I could come up with the story about Potter's staff, and lo and behold, there it is on page C2 of the Metro/Northwest section of Saturday's Oregonian: "Before taking oath, Potter announces his staff." Again I search in vain for this story on your site -- alas, it is not there.
Ah, the frustration. Perhaps those other bloggers aren't so misguided after all. I feel the execration.
UPDATE, 3:15 p.m.: Here's the Tribune story on the Potter staff, at least. And more about that later.
UPDATE, 4:28 p.m.: The addressee of this post sends along the link to the story, here. Why the search engine on the site doesn't find it, I guess we'll never know.
| Posted at 12:57 PM | Permalink |
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Comments (14)
To be fair here, most people didn't call anyone on the carpet re: Cosgrove. The invective was against OregonLive itself, with numerous defenses of both Cosgrove (on the OL site) and those on the newspaper side, in addition to us readers, being trapped in a system that sucks.
Posted by The One True b!X | January 4, 2005 1:13 PM
Odium? Ececration? A pox and a fie?
WE'RE IN OREGON AND IT'S 2005 DAWG.
Posted by James W. | January 4, 2005 2:05 PM
Yes, by "hate the Velveeta" they meant hate the product, not Mr. Velveeta.
Ay yo, dawg, easy on the caps lock key or I'll bust a cap on y'all's commenting privileges.
Posted by Jack Bog | January 4, 2005 2:33 PM
Even before the Web and the advent of blogs, the Boregonian has always been quite simply one of the worst newspapers I've EVER encountered. As an editor/writer myself, every time I look at that paper I wonder just what the O' editors get paid for doing. As for the website- it's unbelievably hard to navigate and usually near impossible to find articles that I KNOW are in the printed format.
Posted by Lily | January 4, 2005 3:29 PM
What's worse (and moderately amusing) is that what DOES come up in a search of the site is the "Today's News in 2 Minutes" which actually references the article about Potter's staff on page C2...which they proceed not to post.
When I want a good accounting of what's in the paper, I always head straight for the Multnomah Library's website (http://www.multcolib.org/ref/news.html), select The Oregonian (NewsBank InfoWeb) and log in with my library card. It has every single article that showed up in the paper archived from yesterday back to 1988. A much better resource than a 14-day archive.
Posted by Erin | January 4, 2005 3:36 PM
Great tip, Erin. The story is indeed in there. Getting in is a little tough if you've got Norton Internet Security, however. Took me a while to get over that hurdle.
Posted by Jack Bog | January 4, 2005 3:52 PM
Interestingly, the "missing story syndrome" was covered in the very BlueOregon thread at which Jack says he shook his head.
Posted by The One True b!X | January 4, 2005 5:43 PM
I'm with Erin as to The Oregonian. So how can we complain about a website for a paper we dislike that much? :)
Be that as it may, I did urgently want a website story once, and exchanged e-mail back-and-forth with an editor who kept sending me "the" link, which kept not working. She was as frustrated as I. After a few days she did come up with one.
I've heard the same at the front desk a couple of times when I went in. They know it is a seemingly hopelessly atrocious site.
As to the paper itself, well, that's a whole 'nother -- and bigger -- dilemma.
Posted by Sally | January 4, 2005 6:17 PM
Ummm...if it's the same search engine technology they had under the hood when I was there, it never has worked correctly.
In fact, they totally disabled searching on the site for at least a few months a while back, only to bring it back with no visible improvement/change to be seen, at least from an external view.
But, to be fair - there's something strange about the way that story's archived/stored, because a site-specific search on Google doesn't uncover it either (you can go to Google and select the advanced search option to look for your search terms on one single site alone, fyi.)
A search for 'Potter staff oath' doesn't bring that story up in Google, either - even though they're all in the first paragraph and/or headline. And if you look at the URL referenced, there's an interesting /exclude/ subdirectory that it's residing in. Does that preclude content in that subdirectory from being searched, I wonder?
Posted by Betsy | January 4, 2005 7:38 PM
Thanks Jack, for the follow-up. As for me, I don't so much have trouble with the paper itself -- yes, quibbles, but nothing huge.
The website is just plain awful, and as I mentioned in my BlueOregon post, it's about Advance.Net, not Kevin "Mr. Velveeta" Cosgrove - probably a great guy, as you've said.
The 14-day archiving and search issues are one major issue - and I understand that there are revenue issues at play (I disagree; but ah well.) The issues I really have are about basic navigation, good HTML, and the like. These all cost NOTHING and will increase traffic, and thus revenue. No-brainers. Yes, a little work, but it's been years.
I'd love to hear from Cosgrove - or someone else currently at OregonLive.com - what aspects of the site are handled locally and what aspects are handled globally. Can they really not change "Opinion" to "Commentary" on a local level? More parallelism with the paper would be a very, very good thing.
Better yet, why not a column on this from the public editor? It's got to be among the top 5 complaints at the Oregonian -- isn't that what an ombudsman is for?
Posted by Kari Chisholm | January 4, 2005 10:49 PM
Hey, I hate to say it, but if you don't like the OregonLive site, don't use it - There are other sources on the Internet for news, I understand. Anyways, the snOregonian sells papers and probably doesn't see the revenue potential. Then again, we could make it look like BlueOregon and hire the WebSite guy there if he is interested at all - or is that the point of this OregonLive fixation?
Posted by Steve | January 5, 2005 7:03 AM
"Hey, I hate to say it, but if you don't like the OregonLive site, don't use it - There are other sources on the Internet for news, I understand."
I hate to say it, but for some Portland news you have to read that paper. And you have to read it not only for "the" news, but for their depiction of it. As with most city papers, in itself it can be an agenda setter.
And heaven forfend you have to buy the thing, though scanning or scamming a coffee shop leftover is also an alternative.
Posted by Sally | January 5, 2005 2:32 PM
Then again, we could make it look like BlueOregon and hire the WebSite guy there if he is interested at all - or is that the point of this OregonLive fixation?
Yeah, that'd be me. And, no, I'm not really interested in rebuilding OregonLive from the ground up. I mostly work for advocates and change agents.
Posted by Kari Chisholm | January 5, 2005 7:07 PM
Hmmm... try that again: advocates and change agents
Posted by Kari Chisholm | January 5, 2005 7:08 PM