Hot clicks at The Oregonian and a survey

The Oregonian, that venerable Portland paper, has been heavy on the reader surveys lately, and stories about fat cats (the feline, not political kind) and cute videos. It’s all about the reader clicks when a newspaper goes digital-first. Willamette Week has a story out about how the clamor for clicks by The O’s owner, Advance Publications is affecting the newsroom; WW writes “Internal documents show the newsroom’s staff faces steep new quotas for feeding the website. The documents, reported by wweek.com March 23, say 75 percent of reporters’ job performance will be measured by Web-based benchmarks, including how often they post to Oregonlive.com. The most productive reporters at meeting their goals will have a chance at earning merit pay.”

I appreciate The O’s continued work on covering oil trains and coal, but like others, I  wonder if focusing on how often a reporter posts could affect his or her ability to do in-depth reporting?

Posting things fast and furious isn’t great for copy editing either. We all have a typo sneak into the paper here and there — what journalist hasn’t reported on a pubic meeting when she meant public? But the irony of a basic typo (it’s versus its) on a survey about readers think about the content on OregonLive is duly noted in the context of concerns that the O is valuing speed and clicks over content.

You can find the survey on OregonLive in the same editor’s section where you can read soon-to-be former editor Peter Bhatia’s discussion of the paper via Twitter posts.

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