Highly defined?
Believe it or not, I’ve yet to dive into the um, eagerly-anticipated Sunday O rework - my head’s already spinning and foggy as I fight off a sinus infection; reading BlueOregon commenters to this post only confirms my fear that reading it might only worsen my condition. And the crowds over at PDX Media Insider (waiting patiently for the new site to debut, of course) seem to concur.
I’ve jumped briefly over to OregonLive, which looks no different - and I see no outwardly visible signs of the promised ‘reader-interactive’ (I still don’t quite know what that’s supposed to mean; do you?) approach on OLive’s home page, at least.
But since I’ve been so, ahem, speculatively critical here before, I’ll just take one for the team - despite my raging headache and 25 pound bowling ball head - and will return with my impressions later this evening. In the meantime - what do you think? Or is the notion of reworkiing a print newspaper to better attract readers irrelevant anyway in the age of the Internet?
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A whole section on Obituaries is still freaking me out. A whole section? An entire section of the Sunday newspaper? Weird.
Why is it weird? It’s a big city. A lot of people die.
I’m very confused. I read The Oregonian online and I see nothing different. Why did they bother with all that advertising if they weren’t going to change anything? It seems dumb to waste resources on a slowly-dying paper product and ignore the web site.
Hi Rah;
Why is it weird? I dunno, I guess when I’m used to picking from main sections that are Metro News, Arts, Opinion, Sports, etc., now seeing OBITUARIES is one of those options is weird to me. Picture Sunday morning: honey, you done with the Opinion section yet? Please pass the OBITUARIES.
That’s weird to me. But that’s me. And my comment.
I dunno… it doesn’t bother me at all. I read the obituaries every day to see if anyone I know (or knew) has died - or if I died and just wasn’t informed. Think of it this way - they’ve made it very easy for you to toss the entire section if you find it too “weird” to deal with.
Obituaries are one of those things that regular newspaper readers care deeply about - one of the things we used to get a lot of email feedback about during OL’s early days was when we were going to offer obituaries online, and I know that wasn’t a unique request to this market
I’d argue that it makes sense to have it in a separate section - in fact, it practically was before. (You might have a page or two of national or international news as the first couple of pages, but the rest of the section was all obits, if I recall.)