Oregonian Editorial blog

The Oregonian today announces the opening of an Editorial Board blog. So far, it posts mostly the announcement and a bunch of Op-Eds. I plan to monitor its progress before affording it the honor of a link in my left sidebar. Anna Griffin and Ryan Frank’s City Hall blog is there already, in part because I appreciate much of their print-version reporting. Their blog has nuggets of information sometimes not found in print, but doesn’t see as much activity as either the Mercury‘s or independent Current Events bloggers’ sites.

A print daily newspaper’s blog carries inherent conflicts. Its readership is likely to be less than the paper version’s, at least until it catches on, so publishers/editors must decide whether to repeat information from the blog in the printed version. Doing so makes the paper increasingly stale for web readers; not doing so means the majority of citizens miss the issues. Increasing readership of the blog could decrease purchases of the printed newspaper. And allowing readers to talk back, without the filter of Letters to the Editor and OpEd selection and editing, makes it more likely commenters may increase general awareness of errors/omissions/conflicts-of-interest of staff writers in the printed version.

The new blog moderates comments, stating (in a post, not on the form for submission of said comments), “We’re going to do our best to maintain appropriate decorum here, so for now, that means that your comments will go to a moderator before they are posted. This is simply to insure civility, not to tamper with your ideas.” It will be interesting to see how that plays out.

Hey, here’s another thought: maybe now someone in charge at the O will realize that burying past print-version articles into the payment-only archives is A Really Bad Idea, especially if they want blogs to link to them so more people read them.

I may make occasional contributions and references to the Oregonian‘s Editorial Board blog, but I expect I will still be posting articles here intermittently lauding or blasting editorials and/or articles in the O, instead. As regular readers have doubtless noticed, often I have more to say than fits in a couple of paragraphs in a comment box.