It's important for you to know that none of this is out of malice. My parents met in J school. My dad's worked for newspapers longer than I've been alive. It's not out of snarkiness that I say any of these things, it's because I genuinely want the Oregonian to be better, and I'm sad it's not.

This week was the official start of the Oregonian's digital-first strategy announced by they parent company Advance Media back in June. It was such a strange move, since the Oregonian has proven to be good at many things, but digital wasn't one of them. It was like Trader Joe's announcing it was going to be an all-produce store.

As expected, it's not an impressive start. The worst part is, they shouldn't be bad at digital! Advance Media owns Reddit, Ars Technica, and Wired, among other impressive digital properties. They know how to own websites. So why does OregonLive.com look like it's aimed for toddlers? Beige with rounded corners as if meant to be the home of generic, inoffensive cartoons. What it lacks in design, it makes up for with horrible pop-ups and a very long treasure hunt called "Find The News." I want to use it. I want to read the news. It's just so difficult.

If you go beyond OregonLive, things only get worse. I subscribed to weather e-mail updates for most of the last year and got day-old weather reports more often than not. Tech support told me three different times it was fixed without anything changing, proving that they also couldn't predict the past.

While they're cutting back on the thing they do well (printing newspapers and bringing them to people) they're adding more inept digital features. You can now get a look-alike edition of the paper at MyDigitalO.com. My. Digital. O. Have you guys never seen the Internet? The absolutely first test any product needs to pass is "does it sound like a porn site?" This sounds more like a porn site than Bang Bus, which one could possibly think was about driving to Hammer School.

But even if you can convince yourself it's okay to click on, you're rewarded with the paper in the least convenient format I've seen for anything on the web. It takes several minutes to load and then appears as if like they e-mailed you a .pdf of the paper but they thought Acrobat looked too nice and was too easy to navigate.

Again, this isn't malice. I'm just venting frustration because I want so badly for them to do this right. I want them to succeed. Because if they don't, I'll have to read Portland Tribune for my hard news.