August 15, 2003

'Oregonian' Turns To Weblogs In The Face Of Northeast Blackout

Advance Internet maintains the web presences of several newspapers across the country, including that of our very own Oregonian. Problem is, their hosting provider is in the Northeast, and has been down due to the blackout.

Yesterday, their sites simply offered a story on the blackout and links to the newspaper sites they maintain. Of course, they were useless because they were just pointing to that self-same page.

Today however, this changed. Advance Internet newspaper sites still present a list of links -- but this time they were different. They were to weblogs (most of them hosted on Blogspot), being used to publish the newspaper content and geographically-relevant Associated Press articles.

For our purposes, take a look at the Oregonlive.com Blog, said to present "the key stories from today's Oregonian newspaper and the Associated Press."

Kudos to whoever it was at Advance who thought it was important to get the content of the newspapers they serve up and online in some fashion, as quickly as possible, and realized that existing weblog services were the most direct route to getting the job done. The site isn't pretty, it's a pain in the ass to find any particular article, and the page is long.

But the content is up and online, and that's what's important.

Posted at 11:13 PM | PermalinkComments (6) | TrackBacks (1)
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Comments (6)

  1. The One True b!X on 16 Aug 2003

    Although I should say that the permalinks don't appear to work, so while the content is there, there's no way to link directly to an individual story.

  2. Nate on 16 Aug 2003

    Ugh. I have nothing but contempt for Advance/OregonLive. The site is hardly representative of The Oregonian and the headlines—when they are working—appear to be written for a news editing system rather than a web site. There are few or no photos, special sections are not on the web, and those of us who browse late at night are often treated to a page of blank headlines.

    I hope that incidents like this will spur The O to create it's own, local, in-house, web site.

  3. The One True b!X on 17 Aug 2003

    Yes, that would be nice.

  4. Mac Diva on 17 Aug 2003

    It cracked me up when I read in the paper yesterday that the only server for Oregon Live is in New Jersey. You would think they would have known to set up a backup, preferably here.

    I can see the worth of having both local and remote servers. If something happens to the local one during our next earthquake, we'll appreciate the one in N.J.

    I don't like Advance at the best of times, though. Their sites are formatted awkwardly and difficult, sometimes impossible, to search.

  5. The One True b!X on 17 Aug 2003

    Oh, Advance sites are horrid when it comes to usability. Not to mention that at least half the time, pages which are supposed to list the last so-many days of stories aren't actually up-to-date.

    Frankly, The Oregonian should just do away with the idea of being a more general portal to information and services and indeed just trim their web presence down to the paper's content, adding various homegrown web specials as events/stories warrant.

  6. reader on 23 Aug 2003

    Jeff Jarvis, president of Advance.net and quite a prominent blogger himself, is the one behind the weblog decision.

    And believe me, however deep your dislike of The O's site, we in the newsroom hate it far, far more. But it is, unfortunately, out of our hands.

Trackbacks (1)

  1. The Oregonian has to start a weblog on 16 Aug 2003

    The One True b!X has a post (link below) about the Oregonian resorting to a weblog to get news out. Here is part of the post from The One True b!X. Advance Internet maintains the web presences of several newspapers across the country, including that of...