Ouch

I'm feeling relatively optimistic these days, about the news industry and my particular hidey-hole within it. It's a great time to be innovating and reinventing ourselves and our business, and I'm having more fun than I've had in a long time. We're building on online store, creating the organization's first iPhone apps, toying again with the concept of an e-paper and doing a long, slow dance with potential content partners.

That said, the handcuffs that continue to be placed on us -- limiting any large-scale innovation -- are real. They're the biggest threat we face. The old "we have met the enemy, and he is us" bit, right?

It's on my mind this morning because humorist and novelist Marc Acito generated by far the biggest laugh of the night at the Portland Schools Foundation Roast Festival last night with the line below. (He was referring to another speaker, Oregonian columnist Anna Griffin.)

So, I went online to read some of her columns, which, of course, meant I had to navigate the Oregonlive Web site. Has anyone here tried to find anything on this site? Seriously, they oughta call it AbandonHopeAllYeWhoEnterHere. Dot Com.

Unfortunately, it's hard to argue with the guy. I mean, if he ever read Anna's columns in the newspaper, there's a tag at the bottom guiding readers to her shelf at Oregonlive. But like an increasing number of Portlaners, he doesn't read the print paper. He wants to find his news online or through his mobile, and we don't necessarily make it easy on him.

So there is a bright future, but it's going to take a fairly large dose of innovation at the local level to find it. One of these days we need to take off the handcuffs and get started.