The Oregonian's New Beer App

I no longer keep very close pulse of our hometown daily, The Oregonian, so I missed the news that they were putting together a beer app. I don't think I'll be sending in jaws to the floor when I report that it's ... not good. One of the biggest complaints locals have had, going back well over a decade, is the abysmal quality of OregonLive, the online site for the paper. The paper's app is actually worse. And even if the digital products were well-designed, they would be hamstrung by the fact that the paper has spent the last five years assiduously ridding itself of competent reporters. (Skip to the last paragraph is you're interested in seeing how they plan to replace them.)

On top of all that, it's really hard to make a decent beer app because of the sheer magnitude of beer information out there (beer, breweries, events). It's nearly impossible to collect it all and, when you do, it begins to fall out of date instantly. Everyone can visualize the perfect app: it contains detailed descriptions of every beer, brewery, and event, and where to find beers on tap at any given moment. The problem is implementing it, which seems basically impossible.


So what did the O do? Oregon On Tap is about as half-assed as you'd expect an Oregonian product to be. It is attractively designed, but contains a weird hodgepodge of info. There's a running feed of stories about beer, the O's pic for best beers, random info about pubs, beers, and pub crawls. Some of these are better than others--the pub crawls feature isn't terrible, though it's just an archive of stories. The pubs section reproduces a Google search in your phone. The beers section has lists by name and style (including such classics as "Helle/Bock," "Pale/Saison/Biere de Garde," and "Bitter Ale."), but doesn't give you much info on the beers or where you can find them. If you can manage a Google search, all this info is at your fingertips anyway.

It does raise the question about what the O is up to these days. Getting into other products seems like a good way to go, but this app is free and contains (at the moment) no advertising inside. They recently went through another round of buyouts, shedding what seems the last bit of institutional firepower they had. The online site continues to be infested with fragments of articles, listicles, and random clickbait--along with terrible information design.

One clue to the future may be glimpsed in an offer I got a while back. The O contacted me to see if I wanted to partner with them. I took the meeting and learned that they have a plan to outsource reporting to bloggers. The notion is that they'll mirror their partner blogs' content at OregonLive. If a post catches an editor's eye, they'll place it in the print edition. Of course, for this partnership they're offering "exposure," not dollars. What is surprising is this nugget: the editor I spoke to tried to play up the fact that I would have total editorial oversight. Whatever I wrote would go up verbatim at OregonLive. What happens if it goes to the print edition, I asked? Surely you'd edit that? No. Apparently if they edit a piece and reprint it, they are legally liable as the publisher. If they reprint something from another source--with typos and potentially false info--they're not legally liable. So to recap: the Oregonian's solution to collapsing ad revenue is to become a giant blog aggregator. I suppose the price is right.

A Difficult Post

Credit: Angelo De Ieso

As many of you have seen, a few days ago the Oregonian severed its relationship with longtime beer writer John Foyston. There are two issues here, and I'd like to focus on the second, less-examined one. But first, the background. (Full disclosure: John started covering beer for the Oregonian a couple decades ago, just a bit before I started a column at Willamette Week. I've known him all that time and consider him a friend.) Here's what the O wrote on Wednesday.

In several instances over the past month, Foyston lifted passages from press releases, industry Facebook pages or brewery websites and submitted them under his byline. We also found one example where he copied verbatim an old beer review posted by a contributor to a craft beer site. 

I'll let you click through for the full details. The real issue boils down to his decision to lift descriptions about beer from BeerAdvocate. That's a very serious journalistic breach, and the Oregonian couldn't overlook it. (Whether John deserved walking papers is another matter.) John posted on Facebook about the issue, taking full responsibility and offering apologies.

I cut-and-pasted and modified some beer descriptions in an unpublished story on 25 favorite beers. Fair enough, that's a violation of journalistic ethics and I freely admit it.... No excuse. Guilty as charged. I shouldn't have done it. 

On the surface, this has the appearance of a cut-and-dried case of plagiarism, and we know the penalty for such crimes is a death sentence. So John got the ax. I'd like to leave his culpability aside, though, and discuss the Oregonian's culpability in all this. John offered no defense for his actions, but he did offer an explanation (this is the part I ellipsed out of the above quote): "Perhaps the crime is mitigated somewhat by the fact that the deadline was moved up three weeks from the end of September to right before I was leaving on a 10-day motorbike trip after Labor Day, thus eliminating the chance to reacquaint myself with beers that I hadn't had in the last year." 

No matter what you think of Foyston's actions in this episode, it's worth pointing out what has become of the Oregonian. Like so many dailies, it was owned by a media conglomerate (Newhouse) that had no idea how to handle the internet age. At first, the paper invested heavily in expensive stories that won awards (including Pulitzers), but not readers. As subscriptions, ad, and classified revenues declined, they decided to scrap in-depth stories and dump expensive senior reporters and editors. They eliminated beats that (presumably) weren't driving ads or readership, and basically quit doing local public-policy reporting. If it's happening in City Hall, for example, the O is mute about it.

In those regular purges, longtime salaried reporters were given a choice to continue along as freelancers, making a fraction of the money they made as staff reporters, or piss off completely. John decided to stay with the paper and continued covering beer. (Look under the byline; if it says "special to the Oregonian," that means the writer is freelancing.) Then, a couple years ago, the O made changes that have turned a once-worthwhile news organ into a clickbaity mess.

Anderson told his staff The Oregonian would deliver papers to subscribers on Wednesdays, Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays. On the remaining days, the paper would publish only a street edition, saving millions of dollars in printing costs. Anderson also announced layoffs; almost 100 of the paper’s 650 employees lost their jobs. The cuts fell disproportionately on the newsroom: As many as 49 reporters, editors, designers and photographers—nearly a quarter of the remaining news staff—will be gone by Sept. 27.

The paper adopted a new strategy based on all the worst trends of internet news.

But the kind of news Oregonians get will change. The Oregonian’s newsroom is already under enormous pressure to write stories that draw hits on the website—often at the expense of in-depth reporting that reveals what’s actually happening in the community....  Staffers say the newsroom has become obsessed with a program called Parse.ly, which measures real-time Web traffic, shows which stories are getting the most hits, and identifies where readers click after finishing those stories. 

In short, in order to address its own gross mismanagement, the Oregonian adopted this strategy: 1) fire expensive, experienced reporters and hire inexperienced, cheap ones; 2) demand reporters post as much content as possible, including in-progress story fragments (something something "developing the narrative" something); 3) base job evaluation on web clicks and, most importantly, 4) abandon serious (read: slow and expensive) shoe-leather reporting. They also fired editors who had oversight of story direction and who edited finished pieces.

Reporters are 100% fungible and survive one week to the next based on how well their stories seem to be moving traffic. You can imagine what kind of product this approach produces. The current version of the Oregonian is a disgrace. The online edition is an unreadable hodgepodge of unedited story fragments and repostings of clickbait from other sites. Reporters "generate content" on random stuff that happens to be going on--or something they found online. There are a few reporters doing actual journalism, but it's no surprise that when a big story breaks, it ain't the O doin' the breakin'.

This is a terrible way for John to end a much-lauded run as the central voice covering Oregon beer. He's done great work, and I have complete confidence that this episode is the outlier--which makes it all so unusual and shocking. But the guilt-pointing finger shouldn't stop at John's face: the Oregonian bears a lot of responsibility in this for creating an environment that doesn't value real news and demands writers publish early and often--no matter how crappy that "content" is. It's easy enough to can John and move along, but something's rotten at the heart of the Oregonian, and that's not going away anytime soon.