I love the Orange County Register, so it pains me to write these criticisms of the Kindle Edition. My complaints are not so much about the content of the newspaper, but about the production and editing of the Kindle Edition itself. I gave it two stars instead of one because the newspaper deserves credit for being an indispensable source of local news and a staunch defender of human freedom in an era when most media outlets scrape and grovel at the altar of government.
Once you try a newspaper with no photographs, diagrams, maps or charts, you realize just how important they are in a newspaper. These missing features cripple the OCR Kindle Edition, and most other Kindle edition newspapers for that matter. Of course there are no political cartoons, puzzles or comics.
There is no weather information. They manage to find space for the lottery results; why can't they squeeze in a 5-day forecast? Temperature highs and lows? Sunny, cloudy, rainy? This would be so helpful.
Many headlines are a mess. A pair of randomly chosen examples, verbatim:
"Deputy jailed in child rape Deputy pleads not guilty to child rape Deputy pleads not guilty to 80 counts of child rape, porn"
"Forgery costs charities $11,000 Children's charities out $11,000 after ticket forgery"
Apparently, what appears in the print edition as a headline followed by a sub-headline in a smaller typeface is simply smashed together into a single messy headline for the Kindle Edition.
All pieces by regular OCR columnists are unsigned. Was that written by Frank Mickadeit? Tamara Chuang? Cindy McNatt? Who knows? But I know how it happened. In the print edition, a portrait of the columnist appears with the columnist's name as caption. Since all pictures are absent from the OCR Kindle Edition, the name of the writer is lost. This would be trivial to fix.
Interviews and question-and-answer pieces in the print edition distinguish the questions from answers by use of bold and normal typefaces. This distinction is lost in the Kindle Edition, with both appearing in normal font without empty lines between them. When questions and answers are long it is difficult to tell which is which. Is this paragraph an introductory part of the next question, or a continuation of the previous answer? You figure it out, dear reader.
Items in the Commentary (op-ed) section are not signed! This section includes pieces by the OC Register editorial staff, syndicated columnists, and other writers. Every one of them is signed "The Orange County Register." Was that provocative opinion piece I just read written by George Will, John Stossel, the OCR editors, a guest writer or a local citizen? I'll never know. This is outrageous. It is also likely a violation of the terms of agreement with the writer or syndicate.
The letters to the editor are not labeled as such. Instead, the title of the first letter appears as the headline for the entire Letters section. If, seeing that headline, you decide to skip ahead to the next article, you have unknowingly skipped past the entire Letters section.
These problems, and more, await the reader of the Orange County Register Kindle Edition.
It seems that no member of the OC Register staff has ever seen his or her paper on a Kindle. These problems would be so easy to fix. An unpaid summer intern could do it in half an hour. The Orange County Register should invest in a single Kindle and issue it to a copy editor. This Kindle should be that editor's only access to the OCR. I have no doubt this person would immediately jump up screaming "What is this stinking pile of crap!?!" and storm off to get it fixed.
