Oregon Media Insiders

Via Jason at OSU Beavers Blog:

Jason goes on to say he respected Steve's work (even as a Beavers fan) because of its quality. No reason why KPNW let him go, though we all know syndicated stuff is cheaper.

Someone just crashed a car through Rose City Radio's front door and surprise! It wasn't directed at Lars! I'm listening to Lars (under duress) and PK from 95.5 says it's a guy who's been sending the Playhouse death threats. More on this as it develops.

Bend's The Source is reporting that a former Bulletin reporter claims he was fired for not sugar-coating the Bend real estate market:

According to an e-mail that the reporter, David Fisher, sent to Bulletin Human Resources Director Sharlene Crabtree and that has been circulating among the paper’s staff, a story he wrote about the Bend Chamber of Commerce’s annual real estate forecast breakfast on Feb. 25 was edited to take out comments skeptical of an imminent turnaround in the floundering real estate market.

...

The official line going around The Bulletin newsroom is that Fisher was fired for lying about being sick and taking two days off. Not so, said Fisher in his e-mail: He didn’t claim to be sick, but wanted time to cool down before confronting Stearns about the butchered story and asking to be transferred to a different beat where he could cover the news “without what I perceived to be the editors' emotional desire to slant coverage of the real estate market.”

In his e-mail Fisher said he told Stearns that the editing of the Feb. 26 story was part of a “pattern of editing that included misleading headlines, sources being banned from my coverage, story ideas getting spiked, and odd pre-story cajoling, all of which seemed designed by the executive editor [John Costa] to generate more favorable coverage of the local real estate market than I have thought was best in the two years I have been assigned to cover it for the paper. I further told [Business Editor John Stearns] that, although I believed that the articles I had written for the paper were as thorough and as accurate as I could make them, the utter hack job that was done on my Feb. 26 story had led me to conclude that the paper was not willing to cover the industry as honestly as it should …”

Fisher expressed his concerns in a meeting with Stearns on Feb. 28. On March 3, Fisher wrote, Stearns told him he had discussed his request to change beats with Costa. The next day Fisher was fired.

Stearns refused comment to the Source.

OPB has decided to end its Golden Hours reading service for the blind by April 30th. From the memo:

When Golden Hours began in 1975, the blind and visually impaired had
few options for receiving news and information. For many years prior
to the rise of the internet and prior to OPB radio becoming primarily
a news and information service, Golden Hours provided one of the only
options for the community it serves.

Today, the number of TV news channels has skyrocketed, the Internet
has exploded, thousands of books and magazines are now offered on