I take exception to Chuck Taylor's rant on his Crosscut site, describing online newspapers in the Northwest as "bad and ugly." Working in the online newspaper world for the past seven years, I can safely state that Washington state is blessed with some of the best online newspapers in the nation.

The web sites for the Seattle Times, Spokesman-Review and News Tribune have all received national awards in the past couple years for their online presence. (A few years earlier, the Herald in Everett even picked up a few national nods for innovation.) And the P-I, in my opinion, has one of the better newspaper web sites in the country with massive offerings of photo galleries, robust reader blogs and first-rate staff blogs.

Of course, we could all do better. We make the most of our resources and technology, but there's always room to do more. Mr. Taylor, however, misses most of what makes our sites worth visiting with his rather uninformed critique published today.

I'd like to address some of Taylor's complaints about the TNT site specifically:

It's not news until we get around to posting it:
The News Tribune in Tacoma freshens its site even later, sometime after I get up in the morning, so I check it last. Not the best way to influence the regional agenda — or the D.C. congressional delegation.

All news articles that appear in the printed News Tribune are automatically published online around 1:30 a.m., so I'm confused about the "freshens" rate. Additionally, he looks at this feature from a print-first view. We're not waiting for the print deadline to publish news; we post news constantly all day. Friday, we posted 16 new stories by 5 p.m (see image). If readers – or the D.C. congressional delegation – want to keep tabs on our area, they should visit our site throughout the day instead of waiting until 5 a.m. the next day. Why get up so early to read yesterday's news?

Do not discuss amongst yourselves: Few newspapers let readers comment at the bottom of articles. (A notable exception is the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.)

With all due respect to my friends at the P-I, the TNT's web site has been allowing comments at least as long (not sure exactly when the P-I started). We began the practice in 2005 and last year we hosted an estimated 50,000 comments on our news stories. Our blogs feature even more robust discussion and last month accounted for almost 15% of our page views. But he doesn't give us any credit for blogging either, even though our Seahawks Insider blog has won national awards the past two years.

I confess that I don't read Crosscut's web site often. But given the superficial reporting that went into this article, it makes me wonder about the rest of the news published there.