Oregon Media Insiders

Over at the Forest Grove News Times, longtime KATU reporter Grant McOmie says he's in negotiations with other stations:

“Fortunately, the competition in town disagrees with (KATU’s) decision, so I’ve been in discussion and negotiations with other channels,” said McOmie, who added that he is hoping to begin work again in September or October, reporting on the great outdoors like he has for the last 25 years of his life. ...
“I’ve had hundreds of e-mails and phone calls and letters from viewers, who wished me the very best,” said McOmie, admitting he was surprised at the outpouring of encouragement and praise he has received since he was let go.

“It was, honestly, one of the most humbling experiences I’ve ever gone through in my life. When you work in television, you never get to really sense the experience of the audience – you can’t see them or hear them or know what they think. We never really get a chance to get feedback, and I got a lot of feedback this time.

“It was all so positive and so humbling.”

Trolls wander into every website now and again, including here at OMI. Please don't feed them. That means not responding to their posts. Some trolls respond to their own posts anonymously to make it look as if people are talking to them; this is referred to as sock puppetry. It has happened here quite recently, and quite a bit.

Trolls want attention. That's why they're trolls. Don't give it to them. Thank you.

Spring Arbitrons are in for Portland. As usual I don't have the demo, but I do have the 12+. And the market leader, for the first time, is a Spanish language station, El Rey 93.1. The top ten stations:

KRYP-FM Regional Mexican 6.4
KWJJ-FM Country 5.5
KKCW-FM AC 5
KGON-FM Classic Rock 4.7
KUPL-FM Country 4.7
KEX-AM News/Talk 4.1
KINK-FM Triple A 3.6
KKRZ-FM CHR/Top 40 3.6
KPOJ-AM Talk 3.5
KUFO-FM Rock 3.4

Who saw this coming? I sure didn't!

I didn't get a chance to follow everyone's coverage of the Gearhart story this morning, but I was impressed how quickly the Astorian got accurate info on their website, and KGW seemed to be only a step behind. (Others may have done well, too.)

OregonLive.com quoted the Astorian and linked to it on its website during the morning hours.

As I just said in a message to Lynn, my wife and I had a place in Gearhart until a year ago and know that house well. It is sobering to imagine how quickly a peaceful, post-weekend morning turned to tragedy without warning.

KEZI and the Oregon Sports Network have split:

The decision is the first local fallout from the UO’s recently signed deal with IMG Communications. IMG agreed to pay the UO $67.1 million over 10 years for advertising, promotion and local broadcast rights for UO sports. KEZI’s decision leaves the university without a local broadcaster just a month before its first football game of the season.

Eugene-based Chambers Communications, KEZI’s parent company, issued a statement Thursday saying the deal offered by IMG left it little choice but to walk away from the contract. ...

Tim Roberts, IMG’s Eugene-based representative, said Chambers’ decision to drop out of negotiations was a surprise. He said talks were centered on how to handle competing programming, when Chambers pulled out Thursday. ...

In an interview Thursday, Scott Chambers said his company paid about $1 million a year for rights to UO sports programming before the UO brought in IMG. Chambers said his company earned a modest profit selling advertising on the shows. Without naming a figure, he said the new deal with IMG would have been a loss for his company.

Wow. I thought OSN was the primary local draw for the station. I continue to hear all kinds of rumblings from down there. What's going on?

I hear this morning that Dwight Jaynes is no longer editor of the Trib as of yesterday. He's not on the masthead at the website. Anyone got the sitch?

Update: WWeek has it.

Update 2: Jaynes Speaks. Blazersedge.com interviews him in email. He implies he wasn't pushed; he jumped.

Tribune Broadcasting has reshuffled its management, landing KRCW in the lap of new executive VP Ray Schonbak. The name may be familiar to former Emmis employees. I'm curious as to how long the agreement between the local CW affiliate and KGW for the 10 o'clock news slot is for.

CBS Radio announced today that it will be selling off 50 of its 140 stations:

Radio [earnings] continued to lag, with revenue falling 10% to $416.4 million, compared with $463.4 million for the year-earlier period. On a same-station basis, revenue was down 9%. Operating income declined 16% to $150.7 million.

Just two years ago, CBS Radio boasted nearly 180 radio stations. It has since shed about 40 stations, and with the planned sale of 50 more, the company would cut its holdings to about 90 stations.

What do it mean for Portland, you're asking. Looks like they'll divest the entire Portland group; their stated strategy is top-five markets. The stations already on the bubble are KINK, KUFO, KUPL and KLXM; the potential buyers are currently unannounced. The other stations in the local group are KLTH and KCMD.

WWeek is calling it a bombshell. My first reaction was:

eep.

Details are coming out from former KOIN ND Jeff Alan's lawsuit against the station, which was filed in April. In it, he claims that Ed Whelan's firing was discriminatory, and so was his own:

At a July 2007 meeting in Portland, the lawsuit claims that Jason Elkin, CEO of NVT [New Vision Television], insisted that Whelan be fired as a condition of NVT buying the station. Alan and [then-KOIN owner] Montecito President Sandra Benton objected, the lawsuit says, because Whelan "was a minority, was older and had recovered from a stroke." But the lawsuit says Elkin "angrily insisted."

At the same meeting, the lawsuit says that Elkin asked Alan, then 54, whether he was too old for his job, and made one other disparaging remark about Alan's age.

Whelan was fired August 20, 2007, as we reported here first (in fact, much of KOIN's newsroom learned of the firing from OMI rather than its own management).

But it doesn't end there:

[New KOIN GM] Chris Sehring ... told Alan to check out a resume tape from prospective news reporter Kacey Montoya, according to the lawsuit. Sehring told Alan that they "would probably be forced to hire her," the lawsuit says.

Alan objected to hiring Montoya on two grounds, the lawsuit says. First, he believed she was unqualified. And second, according to the lawsuit, "some quick internet searches" revealed that Montoya appeared "in inappropriate material" under the names Kacey Aliece and Kacey Bytheway.

Montoya told WWeek she had been a swimsuit model before becoming a reporter and doesn't regard the photos as erotica. She told WWeek, "I never posed in any pictures with the intent that they would be put on an erotica site. This is not the kind of modeling that I did, and I would like it if you made that perfectly clear." According to the lawsuit, both Alan and former KOINer Theresa Stedman objected to both Montoya's hiring and her salary, described as at a higher rate than they had approved. Current KOIN ND Lynn Heider is standing by Montoya.

Alan was fired in January 2008:

The lawsuit ... claims Alan was fired due to age discrimination, out of retaliation for opposing Montoya's hiring, and out of retaliation for acting as a whistleblower on Whelan's firing.

(FYI, Alan was not my source on the Whelan story.)

Alan wants his old job back plus $2.5M for economic damages and pain and suffering. KOIN owner NVT and its CEO Elkin are named as defendants in the suit.

Some thoughts on all this:

First, can lawsuits from Stedman and Whelan be far behind?

Second, for once the innuendos that accompany virtually every pretty young woman into this market on this website turned out to be at least a teeny bit true. When Montoya came on at KOIN, someone in the comments outed her "Kacey Bytheway" identity, or whatever you want to call it--I have no idea if that was her alias or one that whoever bought the photos gave her Bytheway is her given name; Montoya is her alias.

Why didn't I follow up? I'm not kidding when I say every single good-looking young woman who comes into this market is assailed with "she slept her way into her job" crap on this website. You don't see it because I delete it; sexual innuendo is about the only thing I delete before it sees the light of day. Why I didn't delete that comment, I dunno.

Another round of buyouts are in the works at the Oregonian for next month, according to O staffers who got the news yesterday in the monthly Q&A with exec ed Sandy Rowe and publisher Fred Stickel. WWeek beat me literally by minutes, but my source has it as 50 positions in the newsroom and 100 company-wide, with details to follow. "If they don't get 50 takers for the newsroom buyout, layoffs of part-timers are possible," says my correspondent, who adds that among this, the NNS closing, and the death of columnist Brian Meehan, "It wasn't a good day to be at the paper."