After having Theresa Hogue in our class last week, it kind of sparked my interest to see what other local newspapers have multimedia additions to their web pages, if they even had one. I thought that it was so cool that the Gazette Times had podcasting on theirs, and so I wanted to take a look and see if how far along everyone else had come too.

The first site I visited was for the Register Guard. I was pretty much expecting them to have all the bells and whistles, but wasn’t sure. After searching their website for a little bit, I found the following multimedia additions: videos, podcasts, AP podcasts and blogs. So I guess they have come as far as the Gazette Times.

Next I looked at the Oregonian. They had a huge amount of blogs listed on their site! Basically one for everything under the sun! THey also had video and podcasts, which were listed under a multimedia section. As far as the Portland Tribune goes, I was really surprised. Their website was cluttered and really hard to focus on. It took me forever just to look through it. As far as I could tell from searching through their site, they didn’t have sort of section for videos, let alone podcasting or blogs.

The Democrat Herald in Albany had a nice website which included a good selection of blogs, photo galleries and videos. One thing I really noticed with their site (probably since I had just looked at the Portland Tribune site and was really unimpressed) was how neat and easy to read the layout was. I would think that if a newspaper wanted to get more people to go online, that they would pay more attention to the layout like some of these have. For the most part, it seems that the majority of Oregon’s major papers have started to include these new forms of journalism, which is really cool because I had no clue that was even happening in the first place!

Sites I visited:

www.registerguard.com
http://www.oregonlive.com/oregonian/
www.democratherald.com
www.portlandtribune.com