[print] The Oregonian To Cease Publishing "This Week"

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This Week, the mid-week advertising circular published for about a decade now by The Oregonian, Oregon's largest newspaper, is soon to be no more.

The rubric has been worn by more than one publication in the greater Portland area over the last two and a half decades. During the 1990s, This Week was a light news and advertising tabloid published by a concern based in Wilsonville whose name escapes me. There wasn't much in it other than a ton of ads, but what was there was pretty good. There was a weekly column about Portland and Portland history called "Round The Roses" by Karl Klooster (fortunately these have been collected into books which are probably available at Powells) that was memorable and readable.

This Week expired sometime around the turn of the 21st Century. Eventually The Oregonian picked it up for its mid-week ad circular, which was rounded out with what they termed "The Best of FoodDay", The Oregonian's mid-week culinary section. FoodDay, to our eyes, had an uneven history over the years: It would start strong and then dwindle off as fewer and fewer interesting things got put in and it became more devoted to trend-chasing rather than exploring the culinary landscape. Over time, though, the This Week, under The Big O's auspice just kind of slowly dwindled away. Lately it's just been a plea to subscribe, sometimes with an interesting article from the Food section of The Oregonian but just as likely with something put in from a national news service or The Washington Post and half a page devoted to an adult coloring book panel.

In view of the wasting away of This Week, the edition we got today amounts to pretty much a mercy-killing:

TW was, interestingly enough, a broadsheet, the last broadsheet publication The Oregonian issued. Typically there was a big ol' Bi-Mart ad, and that was useful. So, if there's any real victim here, I'd say it would be Bi-Mart.

But if you want what little TW had to offer, you'll just have to plump for an edition of The O. And so that goes.

Though it could have ranged from four to eight pages at its height, it was only one rather stiff sheet now, as it has been for a while. The back looked like this:

A recipe for madeleines, sourced, as it would happen, from The Washington Post, an appeal to subscribe to the Fun Size Oregonian, and as much of what we oldies used to call "the want ads" as they could fit in. But, here's a thing: let's zoom in on the madeleines recipe, shall we?

It was written by Dorie Greenspan, special to The Washington Post (I guess that means she's a stringer) and is brief history of the French cake-biscuit, complete with some interpretation of the shell-shape (an homage to religious pilgrims who used the scallop shell as a badge) and the obligatory, if awkwardly-worded and inaccurate reference to Proust (referring to a short paragraph in 'one of the 20th century novelist's long books, 'Remembrance of Things Past''), paired with a tempting recipe for her own coffee-and-cinnamon inflected version (which sounds tempting to me, but probably is a horror to a purist). No worries for the tradtionalist, though; the traditional madeleine is recapitulated in that final paragraph, though amusingly noted as a 'variation'.

So, in the final edition of This Week, the only original local content is a big front-page thing telling you that this was the last This Week. The rest, they got from somewhere else, which is kind of an exegisis of the state of Portland media to me, these days. It used to be so colorful.

But then, I realized a thing. The last valuable bit of information imparted by this publication was a French baked delight famous for triggering memories that recover unremembered memory. Could the layout artist be sending a bittersweet message here?

When it comes to Portland media, most of the best is a remembrance of things past.

Abysinnia, This Week.

And so it goes.

[liff] It Really Got Underway When I Found Out They Tore Down The Old Corvallis Gazette-Times Building

3455.

Firstly, and at the outset, I'd like to make it utterly crystal clear that I'm not here to cast aspersions or tell the newspaper business how to run its business … well, not necessarily. I am, after all, a prole. I go to what work there is, do what work has to be done, and come home to my anxiety-ridden, yet cozy-if-not-entirely-comfortable-and-without-pitfalls life.

But you know how, once you past a point, you start to recognize, since you can no longer ignore it, how things you took for granted and for constant had actually changed out of all recognition? Become things you no longer recognize? There is a point. We all remember it, like that legendary moment when we're all at a iconic disaster and you're saying to each other yeah, you know you never forget where you were when. 

There was a before, and there was an after.

Before, at 600 SW Jefferson Avenue in Corvallis, Oregon, was the headquarters of a fondly-remembered part of a younger life. Twice in my life I've called Corvallis home. It's a pretty town, located in a lovely place. Of the major northwestern Oregon cities, it's the only one that is not hung off I-5 like a bead on a string, however, because of Oregon State University, drawing students from all over the world, the sophistication of a much larger town always seemed to be in the woof of the town's fabric. And, while being Oregon's Ag college, there is a great deal of tech research going on there, so before the internet was that big a thing, it was a cinch getting a internet login there.

Those of you who did online in the 1990s who know the name 'jacobs.orst.edu' would know what I mean. So, it was off the beaten path but it was a pleasant size and not too far away from everything. Corvallis remains pleasant to this day.

Screenshot of the article you can find here.

During the day, the daily paper was (and still is) the Corvallis Gazette-Times. Being a newspaper devotee, a habit borne of long practice, I loved that paper. It was a good size for the town and hit all the high spots; what I remember most was the fairly-cracking good writing of the editorial page editor, Wendy Madar. The paper itself was house in a solid, understate building bounded by SW 6th and 7th Streets and SW Jefferson and Adams Avenues. It was just west of downtown, a building of red brick and gray concrete, a welcoming little courtyard in front where there were benches for anyone to use, a tree-shaded park-like setting, and a big front porch with the words Gazette-Times in newspaper-masthead black letter in iron over the front of that. It was the sort of building that expected to be around a while.

A cherished memory is going into the lobby, in front of the newsroom, and to the left, there was a rack with a number of recent papers there. Anybody could go and peruse them, and several times, I did. I remember the newsroom, with that quiet hubbub of people getting news things done. All that is in a capsule in my mind.

Back in November, whether it was before or after The Election I don't recall, but I got one of those little frissons of 'wonder what that's doing right now', you all know the kind, and I go looking through Google Earth to get a view of the old building. And I see that there is a Corvallis-sized city block of scraped earth there. And that stunned me for a very long time.

The G-T building in 2012. Google Street View.

I have studied the history of the building a bit. It was built in the 1970s, back when the paper was still a family-run operation, owned by the Ingalls family. The publisher, Robert Ingalls, wanted a new building that would give the paper room to survive and thrive. He was thinking of the future, but maybe not the future we all got, where media owners went from many owning many to just a few owning the many; eventually, the G-T got bought by Lee and went from being the Albany Democrat-Herald's competitor to its partner. Eventually, printing equipment, circulation staff, the whole nine-yards moved east to Albany. 600 SW Jefferson became too big to keep. And so it was sold. And demolished. In the year 2015, 104 years after the founding of the paper. The article about it can be read here.

The G-T is now in a leased office in a corner of an older strip-shopping center in the 1800 block of NW Circle Blvd in Corvallis. Just reporters and editorial staff and management. Doesn't require much space, I guess. Look, I get it; the business is changing, they can't support the old physical plants; it's all about content, all media organizations have to make money. I get it. Really I do. But when I found that the G-T's urbane, lovely city center headquarters was now really just a storefront in a North Corvallis shopping center, my heart, already broken by the self-consumption of The Oregonian and the blanding of the once-vibrant Portland radio scene, got broke into a few more pieces, and I couldn't ignore that things had started to change into something I didn't really want to see any more.

Another thing I get is that change will happen, models will evolve, change, and disappear. I get that, too. What I wish didn't have to happen, however, was that not only the new is embraced, but the good part of the old gets shunned. I said it when The Oregonian moved out of 1320 SW Broadway; edifices matter. When it comes to media such as newspapers, they matter. When you move your century-plus local newspaper - a newspaper, I'll remind, that celebrated its centernary back in 2009 with a birthday party that included a dapper character re-enacting the coin flip that chose the order the then-newly merged paper's combined name would go in - to a small leased office on the north side of town, certainly that reflects current realities. They are what they are, regardless of how regrettable that might seem.

What bothers me is that it may also reflect a future with diminished, narrowed horizons, a future where we're all thankful we're doing as well as we are because we could be doing so much worse.

It's hardly a part of my life, but I'm mourning it. Which should tell you a great deal about me, I guess, somehow, in a way.

The Gazette-Times' building's demise was documented in a scene that can still be viewed by all and sundry at http://www.gazettetimes.com/news/local/gallery-gazette-times-demolition/collection_e13be39e-d06b-5f11-ae4b-228715d1bcd6.html

There was a before, and there is an after.

Welcome to after.

[liff] Passive-aggression Does Not Suit You, Seattle Times

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A blandishment from The Seattle Times recently displayed my way:

Here I am, slaving all day, working my fingers to the bone printing news on paper and online, and maybe you could throw a dollar our way, we're down at Pioneer Square begging for a handout and we have to hold out a tin cup just to get by, but, no, websurfing consumer, please enjoy your limited access. We'll just be over here in the corner if you need us.

Look, Times, how am I going to enjoy my limited access if you kvetch like that all the time.

Sheesh. How needy can you get?

[news design] The Willamette Week Goes Full Enquirer

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The cover of this week's Willamette Week tells us that it has endoresments for the political derby, but tells us in a way that totally reflects the bizarre, chaotic, lurid thing that the presidential race 2016 has been:

They're satirizing the National Enquirer and the Star with equal wit, and in a tone-perfect way.

The endorsements are a rather bewildering lot that may leave you with a slow burn in some places, but the cover's suitable for framing. 

[print] You Can't Expect A Redesign Rollout Without a Memorable Glitch

3395.

The rollout of the new re-re-redesigned The Oregonian was pointed out here two missives back. And it's not a bad thing.

But the redesigns of The O haven't been without their oopsies. Here's a highly amusing one. The fact that involves the comics page is sheerest coincidence.

Peep, if you will:

On the left, the section for Thursday, October 6th. On the right, Wednesday, October 5th. There is one difference: Thursday's section is headed Puzzles, whereas Wednesdays is headed Puzzles & Comics. 

But that's it. That's the only difference. Thursday's content is the exact same thing as Wednesdays.
Check the detail here. Wednesday's:

vice Thursday's:

The downside is, you've seen it all before; but that's the upside too, as you already know how to do the puzzles, you know how the comics turn out, and if your horoscope was splendid on Wednesday, well, Thursday's going to be just as good. 

And so that goes.

[print] The New New Oregonian Front Page, In The Flesh

3393.

Saturday was our weekly sojourn to that bastion of a democratically informed public, the Mighty MultCoLib, and I finally got my chance to lay my meat-peepers on the real thing, and get an idea of how visually impressive, the new new The Oregonian design is.

Here, on the table in front of me, the paper:

A thing that was merely a protoype a few days ago is now a thing that's a thing. It's still a tabloid thing, though; one feature of the re-design is certainly not a return to broadsheet-ish.

The impression one gets is not so much that of a newspaper as some sort of hybrid between a newspaper and a magazine.

The modified blackletter O which serves as the "Oregonian Media Group"''s logo has the pride of place on the page, in the upper left-hand corner, where most of us really enter a page. That's smart; if you think of the page as a battlefield, that's where the invader (your reader) will make their landing. This also sets up a natural idea of grid, espeically the way they've sliced off the O on the right, giving a hard line with which to define a visual column and to draw the eye right down to where an important story could be. The bottom of the O extended left could also be a visual boundary, but somewhat of a weaker one.

The name of the publication, always a good thing to have, still plays but a supporting role in the layout.

Here, the O not only defines a natural visual progression from the top left down but the top left to the right across the top of the page, where a couple of notable interior news stories are called out.

The foliage photo in the middle of the page is allowed to break out of its bounds and overlap the big O, providing a bit of visual iconoclasm that has the result of drawing the eye into the one direction that the big O in the corner does not directly encourage. This space, already defined by the trend of the big graphic to pull the eye along the top and down the side, is ideal for a bit of color. In this case, a brief seasonal word about Portland's Hoyt Aboretum as a blandishment to visit, along with hours of operation and encouragement to visit online sources where more information can be found about the place, as well as online links to more images.

Where's the front-page index, you say? Right here, at the bottom, almost invisible.

The use of the fonts, Tiempos and Guardian Egyptian, are appropriate, but like the front-page index, the bylines and slug lines have also been rendered nearly invisible. I'd punch that up just a little. And I've noticed the type in the headline about the Arboretum, which is one I don't recognize and don't remember seeing it announced, is for subject headings in many of the stories. It scans well and has a genteel feel to it.

My verdict? Since The Oregonian has been going through it's changes the last few years, I've not been a fan. I don't get the idea of scaling the paper down to a tabloid size; thus robbed of the pleasure of not reading a broadsheet, the whole experience is a little less fun. I'm still making my peace with it. That is an ongoing project.

This redesign is, however, a solid idea. Reducing the O to a small box in the upper left was a change that was visually aggravating, and making the old masthead type even smaller broke my heart. A classic masthead like that is something you boast, not something you tuck away. So, even though the design fixation on the O is something that strikes me awkwardly, the way the design manifests it is an improvement, and the way it's put into service to catalyze the page layout here is sensible. It does bring a welcome sense of personality to the layout that the redesign lacked.

That was the message I read between the lines of the editor's blog post last week, and that's what's been accomplished. 

[print] Proofreading, Schmoofreading

3388.

I know it might be in poor taste to poke fun at a prototype layout, but geez, Soylent News™, how hard can it be to recognize this one?

Calorado?

Next thing you know, this state will be called Idahoregon. 

Proofreading. It saves … well, something. 

[print] The Oregonian: Redesigning Again, For The First Time, Again

3387.

So, I just peeped this on OLive:

Meet your new-new, New new new The Oregonian, Portland. Editor Mark Katches has some joss-stick and whalesong about it in his Editor's Notebook posting, including that it's starting today. From Tuesday, October 3rd, 2016, then, this will be the look of your morning paper, should you choose to look at it.

Featuring a new headline and body type, the most noticeable change is the releasing of the O from that tiny box they tried to imprison it in. The gothic blackletter wordmark The Oregonian also seems to have enlarged a bit. The technical aspect of the type, as related by Katches, is this:

Although the body type in the printed paper is the exact same size as the one readers are used to seeing (8.6 points), focus group participants overwhelmingly felt our new font and style was more readable. We've switched the body type from Guardian Egyptian to Tiempos Text – something that really only will matter to typography nerds. Bottom line: It is designed to read bigger.

We Portlanders read big. And, I am a typography nerd, so, for compariston, here's Guardian Egyptian:

Guardian Egyptian with drop caps. Source.

And here's Tiempos:

Tiempos Headline, with Text below. Source.

Also visible at the editor's blog post is a sample of what The Sunday Oregonian's going to be looking like. The 'nameplate' is going to be more the traditional style, across the top, a more old-fashioned newspaper approach. Of course, it's still all going to be tabloid, not broadsheet, but at least it won't look bad like it used to. If we're going to have to endure this Fun Size paper, at least it won't look awkward and uncomfortable.

The big O is going to have more fun on the front page, that's for certain. As Katches says:

Don't be surprised to see photographs and illustrations "interacting" with our Big O from time to time.

… which suggests to me that they're going to play similar graphic design games with the O as USAToday is playing with the big blue dot, which I actually like the sound of … I scoffed at the USAToday redesign when I first saw it, but the visual puns they play with that dot have actually been witty more often than not.

Also, the longtime Foodday section is simply going to be called Food from here on out. Whether or not the three ending letters were given buyouts or simply laid off is not known as of this writing.

I only have a virtual version of the paper to look at; as soon as I get a look at the newsprint-version, I'll add some more remarks and snarks.

[pdx] Two More Reasons To Smile If You're A Portland Liberal Who Likes Print

3291.

Two things that have happened in the last week that should make you smile if you're liberal, a Portlander, into literature, or a liberal Portlander into literature (surprisingly, that's not all of us, campers).

The first thing is that The New Republic, the 102-year-old journal of liberal thought and opinion, is now essentially a Portland immigrant, but its mentor is a good one. Win McCormack, who ran the legendary Oregon Magazine back in the day and currently helms Tin House Press and is one of the greatest literary figures Oregon has produced latterly, bought TNR out of the hell of 'vertically digital integration' that Chris Hughes was moving it into. The Wall Street Journal reports:

When announcing his intention to sell the publication, Mr. Hughes said finding a sustainable business model for the magazine had proven elusive. But he says he believes that Messrs. McCormack and Fish are the right people to lead the publication forward.
“I had many conversations with qualified candidates, and of those I ultimately concluded that Win McCormack and Ham Fish are those stewards. Their backgrounds in journalism and progressive politics make them uniquely qualified to lead such a historic institution,” he said in a statement.

When you're looking to give a liberal magazine a proper home, going with an actual liberal is always the best way, I think it's axiomatic to say.

The other notable thing that should make every good liberal happy is that the Oregon Center for Public Policy is moving its office to the center of the big-time. I like saying that the OCPP are the policy geeks The Oregonian thinks they're talking to when they talk to the Cascade Policy Institute. That is to say, when Soylent News™ goes for some reasonable political voice, they think they've found it in CPI but, as usual, they're wrong about that.

This can only be good news for the OCPP, as Chuck Sheketoff's voice has been gaining much strength around here and of the two big voices, OCPP is much much more on the side of working Oregonians of all types and those of us who think we're a community rather than those of us who see the Oregon economy as some sort of Thunderdome.

And if you'd like to work for OCPP and have the mad office skills, there's a position for Office Manager open: http://www.ocpp.org/2016/03/03/2016-office-manager/

[print] It's Always February in Lake Charles, Louisiana

3281.

Circulating on Facebook right now, courtesy of the auspices of one Lelan J. LaBorde, is this following picture:

There is a newspaper in Lake Charles, the Lake Charles American Press, and, apparently, at least one press run of the paper of March 1st, 2016 cheerfully wished Lake Charlesians good morning on a happy Tuesday, February 30th.

Truthfully, the jury's still out on this one. It's too early to say for sure if it's been 'shopped; after all, despite getting to just the edge of virality on Facebook it still hasn't broke through in the news or in trending topics there. As a matter of fact, the comment thread itself has a split of opinion, with more than one reader posting versions of the American Press's front page that say both Feb. 30 and March 1st. The suspect pictures don't seem to have been 'shopped, or if they are … we have a true pro on the job.

Check it out yourself. Here's the FB post: https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=1263148297034687&set=gm.480900548774338

In the meantime we wish everyone in Lake Charles, LA a happy Wednesday, Feb 31st.

[print] Soylent News™'s New Calendar Strikes Again …

3128.

… but, on what day, it's kinda hard to tell. But then, isn't time an arbitrary thing, especially when NCA3 is doggedly, tirelessly, relentlessly redefining today's The Oregonian as a thing to be read?

We return to the scene of the crime, Library Day (accept no substitutes), and The Wife™, who is doing her usual weekly catch-up, and peeps it. Here's the wide-angle view:

So stipulated. And, now, the closeup.

Yep. As documented previously, there's been the Julian, the Gregorian, and now, the Oregonian Calendar. Didn't like the way Sunday, August 11th, 2014 worked out for you?

Don't worry, Soylent News™ is giving you a do-over on Monday, August 11th 2014.

But, as documented earlier, remember, it's always Tuesday at the new Fun-Size™Oregonian. 

And Tuesday is Soylent News™ day. 

[print] It's Always Tuesday In The New Fun Size™ Oregonian

3123.

Changing calendars is nothing new, of course. The Julian calendar was upgraded to the Gregorian calendar, an in Ethiopia, they use a version of the calendar that includes leap days once every four years regardless (instead of omitting it in years evenly divisible by 400, as we do), resulting in the oddity (to us, anyway), that New Years Day, 2000, didn't happen for residents of Addis Abebe until September 11th, 2007. It is currently 2007 by the Ge'ez calendar.

However, in the West, we still keep to the Gregorian calendar, but here in the Beaver State, we've upgraded again … to The Oregonian Calendar.

It was revealed to us during our usual visit to the library. The Wife™goes through the week's Fun Size™ Oregonians which, as I've mentioned before, we never seem to have trouble getting, and she's frustrated, wondering where last Wednesday's paper was.

At last she lays it out day-by-day.

Oh, wait, what's this then?

Now, on my calendar, things don't run that way.

As our friend, the vintage Casio PV-S400 Pocket Viewer PDA will tell you, Monday the 21s is followed by Tuesday … the 22nd. The 23rd isn't supposed to come until Wendesday. 

Unless …

They've decided to upgrade our very calendar? Could that be? I mean, the modern The Oregonian is working hard to redefine our very idea of a newspaper as something to be read. Why not? But this isn't a calendar upgrade so much as a modern calendar levelling up, introducing new days in new sequences, without warning to the general population.

Kind of like reality until you find a Konami cheat for it.

But more research is called for. Stabilizing the test subject on the examining table, the patient is opened to examine the interior makeup … and IT'S STILL TUESDAY …

No need to panic. It was Tuesday, the 22nd, all along … they just hid it inside.

Of course, now Tuesday the 23rd follows Tuesday the 22nd. Mayhap Tuesday the 24th, after that, Tuesday the 25th, ad nauseam …  it's always Tuesday in Portland now. 

And it just stands to reason.

Tuesday is, after all, Soylent News™ day. 

[pdx] When Soylent News™ Stops Consuming People, It Will Eat Itself

3083.

This just in, via Randy Stapilus, blogmaster at the Ridenbaugh Press:

Post by Randy Stapilus.

Ai, yi, and and an ever lovin' yi. If Randy's source is correct then the circulation at The Formerly Big O is now about 63 percent of what it was … six months ago? 

Six months? 

Holy moly.

I make a lot of fun of the decline of The O. I do it basically to keep from crying and dying inside. Portland, Oregon is the 26th largest city in the fourth most populous country in the history of countries. Our 'daily' (not if you get it delivered any more, it ain't, of course), in its new 'fun size', once had bigger ambitions than the number of clicks it could get on a story at the website. It hurts, so I wiggle my ears and stick my tongue out and remind you all that Tuesday is Soylent News™ day, but I'm not happy about this. Not really. I daren't think they care, either; they stopped caring about my level of the socio-economic strata some time ago.

For a time, I delivered the pape, when I was a younger dude. True story.

A great American city deserves a great American newspaper. Sadly, The Oregonian is no longer that paper. Gone are the voices that used to make it great, and I see no Margie Boulét, no Phil Stanford, and certianly no Jonathan Nicholas (remember him, folks?), no 'appointment column reading'.

But the comics are in color, at least. Yay.

Maybe The Columbian can speak for us? They seem to still publish a newspaper intended for grownups, 7 days a week. The Statesman-Journal's looking better and better, all of a sudden, and at least it's published in the state capital. That ought to count for something.

In the meantime, the readership of Soylent News™ is apparently precipitously dwindling … but, don't think of it as deserting the paper.

We're just conciously decoupling.

Remember, Tuesday is Soylent News™ day.

[pdx] Meet The New "Fun-Size" Oregonian

3045.

Welcome to the new era. The Oregonian has gone post-newspaper.

They still publish one, mind, in a sense of the word. Newsprint is reeled off rolls, run through presses, and ink deposited in patters resembling letters, words, pictures, and such, in parseable array.

I had an idea of what I was in for when The Wife™ and myself stopped by the Jackson's Shell station at 122nd and Division before our weekly bout of Library time (you should all have a weekly Library day, by the way. Some sort of intellectual life. It's free. It won't kill you). Seeing those little The Sunday Oregonian early editions had generated an emotion that I don't think I'll ever be able to put into words.

Finally arriving out our branch and setting up for an afternoon of browsing, reading, and writing, we found several of The New Breed racked up where the should be. And, actually, that was rather odd. Since we no longer (for a bunch of reasons both practical and intellectual) subscribe to the pape, we catch up over the week at the Library. Typically, it was tough to find the week's editions; they were out around the building, all being read. Today, they were all in position, with no competition for reading them.

"They're all there," Wife™ says. "Nobody else is reading them."

And that is strange. Maybe it isn't a thing. Time will tell.

Left: a traditional broadsheet. Right: The Oregonian, "Fun-Size" edition.

 To be honest, I was having trouble visualizing such a small paper. The tabloid "Fun-Size" format has been identified with newspapers that are thought of as newspapers because they can't adequately be described as something else (e.g., National Enquirer), or major city dailies who were redesigned by people who were more interested in money than news (the post-Murdoch Chicago Sun-Times comes to mind).

Well, on the upside, my brain didn't burst into flames and I didn't cry and die inside when looking at this stunted little thing. World didn't halt spinning on its axis and career into the Sun. So, there's that.

But I do note that the Fun-Size edition debuted on the 2nd of April. I can only conclude that this is because if they rolled it out on the 1st, they would send the mother of all mixed messages.

The difference in layout is striking. The pre-April 2nd Oregonian carried the classic banner black-letter announcing the paper's title, a touch this old-fashioned mind always liked. In the stripe below the title, the wording Always On Oregonlive.com can be seen. There was a time they boasted of the Pulitzer they won there. We've come so far.

The current version shrinks the proud title to a minisculeness above the new-look Oregonian Media Group logo, a redesign which amounted to filling in the right side of the blackletter capital O.

The section heading. 'Memba when you could get the Living section or the Opinion section? Not no more, chum. Takes a sharp eye to deduce where one section takes up and the other leaves off.

The new Fun Size's section are all stapled together, a practice they are most proud of, ciding that they are the only daily in America to use stapled sections. They do it Europe, you know. The Fun Size's sections are nested within one another. The above it Saturdays. Tuesday, April 2nd's, was arranged thusly:

If you didn't pay attention to the table of contents, here's how you know you've stumbled into the Metro section of Saturday's paper, which is subsumed into the Main section:

The comics are all in color. This is a mixed blessing. Yay, because color comics, but, you know, some of the more richly-colored comics tend to look muddy when printed on newsprint. So, points for style here, but I actually preferred them in black and white a little more.

I will concede points for solid, sensible design as far as it goes, though. This Business section front page is a good example. Each new section has a signature color, and the front page's upper left ear is a square of that color. The boundaries of this square, extended out, give solid spines along which to organize and arrange the rest of the content. If the page layout of the Fun Size edition is based on modules, I'm betting that the single modular unit is the size of that square. So, solid layout logic, good.

Like I said, they redesigned The Oregonian,  and the world didn't end. Still, after watching the trajectory of the paper since the changes at the top, I can't say I'm encouraged.

Change doesn't happen in a vacuum. The Oregonian, a paper that once promised everyone who worked at it their jobs for life as long as they continued to do them well, has been hollowing itself out from the inside, as far as I'm concerned. The massive layoffs last year were just an inflection point in a path that began when the paper decided that on Mondays, Opinion would no longer be a separate section, and went through points on the curve that included Jack Ohman's departure for the Sacramento Bee, where he shines just as fiercely and funnily as he ever did here in Oregon, and the recently released news about compensation and performance standards that accentuate posting stories to OregonLive.com over everything else suggest that the West's largest daily is going to a place where I, bluntly, don't think we're going to be well-served from.

It doesn't signify, to me, courage in changing our idea of what a newspaper is and can do so much as it signifies, in the final view, a narrowing of perspective, and a stunting of horizons. Finding itself under too much pressure to aspire to greatness, The Oregonian is willing to settle for chasing clicks on a computer, web impressions on a smartphone.

The Fun-Size O's managment call it a 'digital-first' policy.

That's also the same policy my doctor has for prostate exams. 

[liff in the PNW] Best Places Guides Series Fades Away

2978.

Today's entry in our "The Death Of Print" file comes via Ben Lukoff on Facebook, wereupon we find that a Pacific Northwest original has published its last edition.

The biannual "Best Places" guides, apparently due to changing times and perhaps mostly the proliferation of smartphones and the absolute surfeit of review websites (I feel a bit guilty here, as I love Yelping) has made the charming local guidebook rather redundant … at least amongst the constituency that would patronize a business likely to be listed in a "Best Places" guide.

The first edition came out in 1975 to much acclaim, and 17 editions subsequently. The editor of the first (and we presume several), David Brewster, writing at Crosscut.com (a great PNW-interest website he founded) cites three major factors, as he sees them: dilution of the market by non-local publishers, a sort of "Gresham's Law" view; a loss of trust in guidebooks in general, where the reading public begins to sense there's a bit of quid pro quo going on, and the proliferation of sites like Yelp, Urbanspoon and the like, which are just a smartphone away.

The entire article has some history and is plain good story telling and reasoned opinion, and can be found at http://crosscut.com/2013/12/09/books/117825/best-places-guidebook-rip/?page=single. I highly recommend Crosscut as a place to stay current on many Washington issues as well as regional ones.

[tech] Print: It's Sensual.

2960.Now, I can't afford a Kindle or whatever's au courant right now. But this article spells out, quite succinctly, why I'm not really craving one.

Turning the pages of a paper book is like leaving one footprint after another on the trail—there's a rhythm to it and a visible record of how far one has traveled. All these features not only make text in a paper book easily navigable, they also make it easier to form a coherent mental map of the text."

Paper books and magazines are always where it will be at for me.

Read (yes, it's electronic, savor the irony) all about it here: http://www.notechmagazine.com/2013/10/why-the-brain-prefers-to-read-on-paper.html

[Edaturs World] Eggcorn Nation: Two Ducks Take To The Air, Only One Comes Down

2895.So, this was written:

An article on Nov. 25 about the artist Malcolm Morley, who has a new exhibition at the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill on Long Island, misstated what kind of aerial battles he watched from the rooftops during the London blitz. He and his friends watched dogfights — not duck fights.

That the New York Times should correct such a blunder is well and good, but that they let it through at all is kind of appalling, though the sting of Headsup:the blog's find is mitigated somewhat by the humor inherent in the fact that the verbiage logically suggests that there, somewhere, in the ETO, during WWII, heretofore undocumented by history, brave Blighty and Gerry war pilots were actually having 'duck fights'.

I would have loved to see what went down there.

Down. Yageddit?

Ah, hah. Well.

As to the aforementioned blogger's ultimate paragraph, we can only give an enthusiastic Amen.

(h/t Nothstine, again).

[pdx_media] The Ohmanless Oregonian

2883.This shouldn't have happened on Bob Ross's 70th birthday, man. Just isn't fair. One of the best things at The Oregonian isn't there anymore, starting today.

Jack Ohman … a personal hero of mine, and one of the reasons that The Big O's editorial page was still a must-visit for us, is no longer there. This, from the pape, today:

The Oregonian's prize-winning editorial cartoonist Jack Ohman has decided to leave the paper. Ohman, who had worked at the paper for nearly 30 years, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize this year.

The message, with the warm byline of simply The Oregonian, was only about four mere paragraphs. So much for an award-winning cartoonist who was nominated for the Pulitzer last year, and with the OR-7 For President campaign, was at the top of a very cool form. Seems a bit wan and un-sincere. Jack, who says (and we believe him) that he will remain an avid reader of the paper, is gracious and well spoken in his announcement.

Also, the article notes that he 'has written and illustrated several books'.  But you're on your own, bunkie. Well, maybe The O can't be bothered to so much as check Wikipedia, but I can:

• Back to the ’80s (1986)
• Drawing Conclusions (1987)
• Fear of Fly Fishing (1988)
• Fishing Bass-ackwards (1991)
• Why Johnny Can't Putt (1993)
• Media Mania (1995)
• Do I Have To Draw You A Picture? (1997)
• Get the Net! (1998)
• An Inconvenient Trout (2008)
• Angler Management (2009)
• Illustrator, Blowing Smoke: The Wild and Whimsical World of Cigars (1997), Brian McConnachie, author

I particularly recommend Back to the 80's, which I still find incredibly humorous, having survived them and all.

Word is he's going to be releasing something about his future plans on Wednesday. Bated breath here at Haus ZehnKatzen.

[print] Can A Non-Daily Print Newspaper Be A Paper Of Record?

2828.File this under the rubric The Death Of Print.

The news broke today, via Poynter, that the daily newspaper of Louisiana's largest city, the Times-Picayune, will be cutting back to a three-day-per-week publishing schedule, and doubling down on its online presence and digital media efforts:

Times-Picayune publisher Ashton Phelps Jr. has confirmed that the newspaper will cease daily publication, moving to three days a week in the fall: Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. He also confirmed staff cuts, though he didn’t say how large they will be. The New York Times’ David Carr reported Wednesday night that the paper likely would cease daily publication and that the two managing editors would leave.
This would make New Orleans the largest U.S. city without a daily newspaper. The Times-Picayune, with a circulation of about 155,000 on Sundays and 134,000 weekdays, would be the largest paper in the U.S. to shift to non-daily publication. Its circulation in March 2005, before Hurricane Katrina flooded the city and shrank the city’s population: about 285,000 on Sundays and 257,000 weekdays.

To give some conception of how that compares, the Times-Picayune (serving a city of about 350,000 in the 46th largest metropolitan area in the US) is just about to adopt a similar publishing schedule to the News-Register in McMinnville (population about 35,000, less than one-tenth the size). Picayune, indeed … Times? Not so much.

Not only does this not bode will for print communications, nor does it contain good news for those who don't care to be required to be wired in order to stay informed, this carries implications for the paper's status as New Orelans' 'paper of record'.

There are two ways to interpret that term. A de jure, everyday way to look at it is that it's the paper everyone turns to to record the everyday history of the area. That is the function filled by the major daily papers in every city, which become the written record of the daily history of the area. In Portland this, of course, would be The Oregonian. 


The more formal de facto definition of a newspaper of record is the newspaper in which public records - births, deaths, legal dealings, etc - can be expected to be found. And this has put the T-P in a certain awkward spot.

Reacting to the announcement that The Times-Picayune will be moving from publishing a daily print version to three days a week in print while expanding its online product, Sens. J.P. Morrell and Edwin Murray, both D-New Orleans, said that a state law dealing with its status as the legal journal for state and local government entities in the New Orleans area will change.Murray said by state law legal notices -- such as council meeting minutes, meeting notices, court proceedings, foreclosures, successions, local bills and others -- have to be advertised in the "official journal" and in New Orleans that has been the daily newspaper.

This law will have to be changed plenty-quick or the paper could open itself to legal challenges, the article (amusingly, on the T-P's website Nola.com) notes. This website is mounted by Adavance Publications which, and we'll try not to worry here, also owns The Oregonian. Which has also reduced staff over the past few years.

It can happen, I suppose. After 174 years, The Ann Arbor News, the daily newspaper in the Michigan city (and thus the paper of record under our first definition) ended daily publication entirely back in 2009, replaced by a website. This digital media company has a twice-weekly print version, and is owned by a company who's owned by Advance Publications, who also owns The Oregonian.


Once again, we'll try not to worry.

But you'd better get yourself an iPad, Gramps, it's startin' to look like.