PDX to JAX wrote:

DucksReign wrote:

I had mixed feelings about OLive elminating the comment section. Since I do not live in Portland and never did, I rarely looked at content beyond sports so I have no experience with regard to commenting on other areas of the site.

However, as much as I enjoyed connecting with Oregon fans including many people here, I grew weary of osu and anti-Duck fans hijacking almost every article with their 99% of the time absurd and agenda driven comments. Comments which had absolutely no relevance to the article itself. Example: An Oregon player has a great game and Orange Army launches into another Nike / Oregon cheats broken record rant.

To that point, I never understood how comments were moderated? By the author of the article? Because it sure seem to me that pro-Oregon comments quickly disappeared on an osu article by Nick Daschel.

Ironically, I did not think at the time that OLive needed to eliminate the comment section(for sports) but rather change how they moderated it. Basically Duck and Beaver fans needed to stay in their respective lanes. If you are you an osu fan then rip Oregon all you want in osu comment sections but do not keep leaping over to Oregon articles to do the same.  Everyone knows Orange Army and his band of sock puppets commented many many more times on Oregon articles than osu articles. Maybe OLive did not have the resources to run a more strict comment section....I do not know.

I also disliked the personal attacks on writers. Completely unnecessary. So you don't like Canzano...post your opinion on what he has written but spare the venom directed at him personally. Beyond petty in my opinion. Especially hiding anonymously. In the old days of "Letters to the Editor" those attacks would have never made it to print. The lack of civility directed at writers certainly did no favors towards retaining the comments section...I am guessing. Canzano has 3 daughters ages 3 to 17...I sure hope the oldest one didn't read what people wrote about her father.

In defense of writers, the transition from paper to online has created a monster and one often full of hastily written content, poor proofreading and related issues. I am certain those writers are under pressure to deliver a quota of articles DAILY during the season. In the old days a writer's article on a practice, heck even the game itself, appeared THE NEXT DAY in print. Plus there were space limitations on how much room the sports pages had for articles. Now the articles are "racked up" one after another hour and hour. The demand and thirst for content along with the reality of the Digital Age has put the pressure on writers to deliver.

For whatever it is worth, still my favorite comment section was on ESPN before they elmiminated them too....going toe to toe with fans from all over the country; everyone had a fake name...it was fun! Everyone moved on to the next week of games...no Orange Army nonsense of writing the same thing week after week regardless of what happened in a game.

Overall and especially given that Portland is neither home to Oregon or osu, I had more positive boxes checked than negative boxes in terms of OLive's coverage of Oregon, osu and the Pac-12. Go Ducks!

The anti-UO comments were so baseless and absurd that it poisoned the site for me. I enjoyed talking UO athletics with everyone here, but too often it became an utter sideshow. It stinks, because you brought so much good data to the conversation, and some of those comments were more insightful than the articles. Losing balanced discussion was a side effect of them unplugging comments. A shame, but they killed that paper on their own...

Thanks and yes a minority of people ruined the experience for the majority in sports and I am guessing the same for other sections too. There might a good chat going on, back and forth, on whether Herbert should have come out a game earlier than he did and then BAM...an anti-Duck commenter starts chirping about how Herbert will not even get drafted. Those comments / commenters should have been moderated out immediately.

Personally I am "verify" driven. If you are going to write that "Oregon's offense sucks" then back it up with something and explain why. People can look at the same stats and interpret them differently...that is fine. Agree to disagree. But just because someone may dislike the play calling doesn't mean the offense sucks.

Anyone who has played and / or coached sports at any level knows games never go in a straight line. College football is especially unforgiving...one bad quarter can cost you a chance at the playoffs. You could argue Oregon's 2019 season came down to maybe 5-6 PLAYS between the Auburn and ASU games that would have had the Ducks undefeated. But then uw and WSU can look at 4 and 2 point losses to Oregon and make arguments about how their season could have been better.
 

Canzano is a very solid writer when he is not going to his crutches too often. He gets very repetitive, but I think a lot of his human-interest work is excellent. That said, his attacks on Bellotti were uncalled for, and he fell on a sword in going after Altman that was completely uncalled for and unprofessional. In that latter instance, it became clear he lacks credibility and connections to the University of Oregon.

I always appreciated Ken Goe. He's a workmanlike writer that has seen a treasure trove of Oregon athletic events and teams. He did seem to resent the UO a lot in the last few years. Oregon rips off seven or eight in a row in PAC-12 football and they don't win pretty enough. Oregon loses in the last second to Auburn and they don't belong in those kinds of games. That kind of wishy-washy opinion grated on me at the end, but I definitely appreciated his candor and ability to interact with readers. I hope there is a place for him at the Oregonian in the fall.

James Crepea is a terrible writer. He did one fantastic human-interest story, but that is the only time I can ever recall reading one of his stories and coming away impressed. His phrasing is wonky, and I can't believe so many errors make it through. Greif and Alger are excellent writers. We had it good for a long while!

Brenda Tracey is one of those "crutches" used by JC as JAX referenced in his earlier post.  Altman on the verge of having his program out of control is another.  Phil Knight at the buffet line is yet another.  UO football "not yet there" props him up.  MLB to PDX seems to be in the attic now, same as anything Bellotti or Chip.  Now that Leach has moved on to the SEC that ship will soon have totally sailed.  

That said, with both JC and KG there is an incredible lack of access to the programs they cover (as also referenced earlier in this thread).  Yes, JC gets Mario "on the show" here and there, but Mario has perfected his delivery of canned replies to just about any question, so you cannot say that JC is even in that guy's head or psyche. KG sees anything UO as toxic and does little to hide his contempt- but it is appreciated that he did engage with the peanut gallery.  

Good discussion!

1) When Rob Moseley was at the RG and George Schroeder was a sports COLUMNIST, the latter would routinely get bashed by commenters for being "anti-Duck" whenever he criticized something about the Oregon athletic program. But his content almost always created an online discussion and people(offline) would ask someone, "Did you read Schroeder's column today?!")

The key in today's world is "clicks" or "click throughs." Someone like Canzano ALWAYS wins because as a columnist his goal is to generate clicks...every comment criticizing him simultaneously helps him and OLive because it means people are reading his content. He draws eyeballs to his content.

2) I do think OLive sports staff were consistently guilty of using the same mindset as anti-Duck commenters i.e. in order to portray osu sports in a positive light, it requires a zero-sum approach with Oregon sports to be criticized or degraded. There is not a single notable stat, in my opinion, that suggests osu's athletic program is anywhere close to Oregon's...not just a team or sport but the ENTIRE athletic program...men and women. As one example, since 1975 osu has won the Civil War a total of 10 times! Or 10 wins in 45-years! That is HORRIBLE. Yet it seemed every Oregon win needed to be "qualified" in order to neutralize the differences with osu. Yes Jonathan Smith made some progress this past season...that is fine...give him some credit(even though they had almost nowhere to go but up) but at the same time, giving such credit doesn't mean Oregon needs a simultaneous downgrade.

Maybe because there are only 3 "teams" to cover in the State of Oregon, UO, osu and the Blazers, OLive believes it is necessary to make sure the UO and osu are "balanced." I do not know. Instead, stick to the facts i.e. Oregon baseball has sucked the last few years. I am okay with that because it is the truth. But at the same time don't make Jonathan Smith to be the new Nick Saban and Cristobal a clueless coach on the sideline.

3) All things considered, I will still take OLive, Canzano, Goe, Crepa, etc. on their worst day over any of the "fan boy" websites like FishDuck on their "best"(cough cough) day. GO DUCKS!

Last edited by DucksReign (4/22/2020 1:03 pm)

Remember "Greg's Gossip"? I was a copy aide at the Oregonian beginning at the end of high school. I went into his office all the time. He had notes, media guides, whatever rat-holed throughout, post office-like fashion. I would spend an hour or so a day just pawing through it. He didn't mind at all. He was a nice old man.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L._H._Gregory

Last edited by LtTony (4/22/2020 9:04 am)

Jiffy Jeff wrote:

Brenda Tracey is one of those "crutches" used by JC as JAX referenced in his earlier post.  Altman on the verge of having his program out of control is another.  Phil Knight at the buffet line is yet another.  UO football "not yet there" props him up.  MLB to PDX seems to be in the attic now, same as anything Bellotti or Chip.  Now that Leach has moved on to the SEC that ship will soon have totally sailed.   

Yes, Brenda was a "cruutch." Shamelessly.

"Phil Knight at the buffet line"???

Jiffy Jeff wrote:

That said, with both JC and KG there is an incredible lack of access to the programs they cover (as also referenced earlier in this thread). KG sees anything UO as toxic and does little to hide his contempt- but it is appreciated that he did engage with the peanut gallery.  

Yes, I forgot to mention that despite how much I disliked KG, at least he interacted with readers. JC did too, now and then. I called in to his radio show once to rip him. Mistake. He controls that stage. He cut me off, then twisted what I said. He is a punk.
 

"Phil Knight at the buffet line"???

Seems that JC can only get a quote from PK at the food table, in the tunnel, leaving the can, etc.  Only reveals that his access is nonexistent there as well, despite listing PK as #1 on his annual powerful Oregon sports figures...

Last edited by Jiffy Jeff (4/22/2020 9:56 am)

LOL. It was that thick in the 60s when I delivered it as a kid. A lot of the guts would arrive on Saturday, and they would have to be stuffed into the news sections Sunday morning at zer0 dark thirty. Lot of work. I could hardly fit them on my bike; I think there were Sundays when I had to make two trips.

Last edited by LtTony (4/22/2020 3:43 pm)