My New Favorite Newspaper

I was on vacation last week and have spent most of this week catching up on the myriad of blogs I read daily; so it was refreshing tonight to sit down and do some honest-to-goodness web surfing, just riding links through the craziness. It was “Bride-to-be Lost at Sea” which led me to OregonLive.com, the website of The Oregonian with such headline goodness as:

• Machete leads to arrest of three robbers in Newberg


• Thieves make off with 130 guns in Vancouver smash-and-grab


• Gun sales explode in Oregon on Black Friday


• Armed sex offender on the loose

It was the last one which got me to thinking. Earlier this week I sat in on a pitch meeting from some visual information wizards --political, not Tufte stuff-- and I flashed back to the meeting when the page loaded with the article. Now the headline obviously did the trick, I clicked through, but in terms of properly using the visual they totally missed an opportunity. "Armed sex offender on the loose" gets you traffic, but

THIS MAN HAS A GUN AND WANTS TO FORCIBLY SODOMIZE YOU

rallies those crazy gun buyers and thieves, plus every machete wielding maniac in the Northwest into a frenzied mob to track this guy down. Then afterward they could help the Coast Guard find the other guy’s mail-order bride. Now that would be community organizing.