Longtime readers know that I am quite frustrated with the shell of the paper that the Oregonian has become. But here’s my number one hatred. They are so namby-pamby with their changes. Don’t want to publish a paper copy of the newspaper anymore? Fine, stop doing it. That would be better than this four-day a week hybrid we’ve got. Don’t want to have certain features anymore? Just print an announcement that you are discontinuing them. That would be much better than just ushering said feature/person out the door and waiting for us to wonder what ever happened to the guy who wrote the local political cartoons for 30 years. Don’t like the name Oregonian anymore and want to be called OregonLive, even though it’s a stupid name? Fine! Just change the damn name. Don’t start using this weird, wordy, dumb looking hybrid Oregonian/OregonLive. Be the newspaper you want to be and see if we all follow. We probably will. We’ve got nothing else.
It seems really strange that they would bother to do this. I’d guess that The Oregonian’s readership is mostly based in the PNW, and therefore most of those readers would understand that The Oregonian and Oregonlive are the same thing. Do they actually have writers whose articles don’t appear on both? Then it would make some kind of sense to me that they feel the need to specify.