Oregon Media Insiders

[Edited/updated 10/10/07--L]

Hey fellow PDX Media Watch fans. I'm Lynn Siprelle, former insider, current geek. Because I'm a geek, and a fan of industry gossip though long-removed from the scene, I've opened this website up for those of us who miss the old blog. At the request of a buddy in Corvallis I've opened it up to include all of Oregon, not just Portland.

it's great that we in Oregon have Lynn Siprelle available to us. people do not know how many things make it online simply because of her. from the MultCo Dems to DailyKos, she continues to make a huge difference with her tenacity, kindness and technical know-how.

and now we have OMI, to replace Pdx Media Insiders, a site i did not know (and wouldn't have been able to appreciate, being down in the Heart of the Valley), but which Lynn loved. so when its founder hung 'em up, she dove right in. that's the kind of person she is. i will say, however, that going Oregon was my idea -- i'm pretty sensitive to Portland-centricism, especially since i moved to Cvls 4 years ago with zero understanding of Oregon life that wasn't Pdx or Eugene. i'm glad she took no convincing. ( also contributed the plural, so she would have to be The Insider, lol).

Audio files

Video files

Who's here? Print? TV? Radio? Observers? Ex-biz? ID your outfit if you can/want to, and I'd love to see if we have any outside-Portland folks on board.

Put random comments in any post labeled Open Thread, preferably a current one, please.

• The anonymous way
• The really anonymous way
• The preferred way

Over on Bert's blog, this was posted in the comments by "twilit maunderings":

Anybody know how the O's newsroom is feeling about the Judy Miller saga? Since Steve Engelberg, her Very Close Colleague and Supervisor before the war, is now guiding O reporters?

Don't reporters like the comfort of knowing that somebody's watching their back, somebody who can be relied on to haul them back to reality if they start going off the deep end? How does it affect your work if the guy who's got your back may have been an enabler as a famously dangerous loose cannon worked herself loose?

Engelberg was referenced in the NYT article on the Miller situation on the 16th, specifically quoted here:

"Judy is a very intelligent, very pushy reporter," said Stephen Engelberg, who was Ms. Miller's editor at The Times for six years and is now a managing editor at The Oregonian in Portland. "Like a lot of investigative reporters, Judy benefits from having an editor who's very interested and involved with what she's doing."

In the year after Mr. Engelberg left the paper in 2002, though, Ms. Miller operated with a degree of autonomy rare at The Times.

Don't know Engelberg, don't know Miller; am curious what O people think about this.

September 15, 1972, at 10:15pm. KQIV FM-107 in Lake Oswego signed on the air. With a broad smile of satisfaction, owner Walter Kraus puffed on his over-sized, custom-rolled cigar and waited for the money to pour in. That never happened. Find out what did at:

http://www.rockininquad.com

From this week's Eugene Weekly comes a story on some property the R-G owns and whether a newspaper can be both a developer and a, well, newspaper. The R-G owns a business park on the outskirts of Eugene that may be the site of a new Triad hospital. (Triad currently runs McKenzie-Willamette Medical Center in Springfield and Willamette Valley Medical Center in McMinnville.)

The R-G owns a vacant 47-acre business park on Chad Drive in north Eugene that has enough room to accommodate Triad's proposed new hospital. The R-G's developer for its Summer Oaks Business Park, Dan Tucci, said he hasn't heard the hospital is interested in the site.

...

If Triad builds at the R-G site, the paper will make a huge profit. The R-G bought one 23-acre piece of the property for about $1 million in 1996. Now the county has put the market value of that land at $6 million. But the land could sell for much more. PeaceHealth paid land speculators about $20 million for its hospital site in north Springfield.

...

The R-G's mixed mission as a major developer and a newspaper could present a conflict of interest. The R-G's coverage of locating the hospital in downtown Eugene has been largely negative and has failed to describe how a central hospital location would save on costly urban sprawl, prevent traffic congestion and make the city more livable.

So how should the modern corporate newspaper deal with stuff like this? Obviously NOT covering it isn't an issue. And what's up with newspapers speculating in real estate anyway? Enlighten me. I'm naive.

Reading the op-ed on blogs today in the O and the commentary on it at BlueOregon.com got me thinking about why I spend so much more time at places like Daily Kos or the late lamented Communique than I do at places like OregonLive.com or KGW.com. The sites attached to local conventional media just don't do much for me; I've even stopped getting weather from them, preferring the ForecastFox plug-in for my browser. (Full disclosure: OregonLive.com declined to hire me at one point, but that actually worked out really well for me so no hard feelings. Best thing all round.)

We all know poor OregonLive's problem--they're hobbled by corporate policy set thousands of miles away. But what I want to know is this: Is it possible for any traditional media concern to run a decent website, or is it just too far removed from the one-to-many model? Who locally does the best job? My general, vague, feeling about it is that traditional media don't have any real sense of how to use the web, and I've seen no evidence to contradict that feeling.

Last Monday (hey, this site's been on the air, what, three days? I'm catching up), artist Jeff Jahn over at the PORT blog calls the O's art critic, DK Row, "Death Row." On Wednesday, WW's Scoop gleefully points to the posting, saying that "Jahn views the O's visual-arts coverage, all too often, as necrotic and wrong-headed." Later that same day, Jahn basically says WTF?:

[M]ust be a slow news week (yet still no art feature in the WWeek... in fact no review this week), whereas the Oregonian has been lavish with visual art coverage. Also, I've always thought that "Death Row" is about the coolest nickname a critic could possibly have. If the editors are gonna fling mud at each other they might as well fling some arts coverage around as well. The last WWeek feature article on the visual arts was in June!!!* Even the Mercury ran a feature on the affair art fair last month.

*Correction the WWeek ran 1 feature article between June and today's date but it is not archived online, "PAM Deconstructed" on September 28th. Similarly the old reviews are not archived either but that is by design... (bad design but design it is).

Ouchie.

And I agree, Death Row is a totally awesome nickname. DK, if you're out there, bumper stickers should be issued.