The Seattle website Crosscut.com has singled out The Register-Guard for one of the worst websites among the many “bad” examples in the Northwest.

The R-G and other regional papers have the attitude of “It’s not news until we get around to posting it: How dare you expect to read the news in the afternoon or evening. These are morning papers! That’s when the news will be ready for you.” Not updating a site continuously is “Not the best way to influence the regional agenda — or the D.C. congressional delegation,” Crosscut.com writes. “The worst example of timelessness is the Eugene Register-Guard, which posts the news at noon. On purpose. Let that be a lesson to those of you who don’t subscribe to the dead-tree edition.”

Crosscut’s criticism is actually not new. Two years ago The Spokane Spokesman-Review‘s Ken Sands blogged about the R-G web site: “the print content seems really old because the site isn’t updated until noon Pacific time each day.”

The R-G may be behind the times in locking up its content. The New York Times announced today that it would stop requiring paid subscriptions to read columnist articles and access the paper’s archive. With so many people accessing news content through Google and links from other websites, the paper figured it could make more money in ads from the extra traffic than in charging for the content. Guess they just discovered what the “inter” in Internet means.

Meanwhile the R-G keeps its archive locked away for paid access. Seems kind of silly. Anyone with a Eugene Library Card can access it for free thanks to the city library.

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