Oregon Media Insiders

Promoted from the comments in the KMTR thread.

The Eugene Register-Guard has announced it's cutting 30 positions, a reduction of more than 11% of its workforce:

[Publisher Tony] Baker said 13 vacant positions at the newspaper will not be filled. The newspaper also is offering buyout and early retirement incentives to employees throughout the paper.

If the company does not meet its payroll reduction target through those options, layoffs will be necessary, he said. The planned cuts account for about $1.7 million in pay and benefits, he said. The company has about 260 full-time and 140 part-time employees.

Employees will be given until June 27 to make application to accept a buyout offer. Baker said he hopes to have the staff reductions implemented by the end of August.

Baker said in a letter to employees that the paper is running between $300,000 and $400,000 short of projections every month this year.

Rick Dancer is done at KEZI--to run for office:

When I say goodbye for the last time on this station I’m leaving some very important things behind. A career wasn’t intended to last forever. But I had almost a quarter of a century at it…..not bad at all. The one thing I will not be leaving behind is you.

Friday was his last day. He'll be making announcements this week in Eugene and Portland that he'll be running for the Republican nomination for Secretary of State.

Update: The Eugene Register-Guard tackles the fairness question:

Although Dancer didn’t say so during his announcement, he is running for the statewide office as a candidate for the Republican Party, with the support of the party. Top-level Republicans were at the studio the night Dancer announced.

KEZI is owned by Chambers Communications, and the chief executive officer of Chambers Communications, Carolyn Chambers, is a long-standing contributor to Republican causes at the local, state and federal levels. She has given more than $90,000 to federal-level Republican candidates and causes since 1994, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics. She has also donated 2,000 square feet of office space to the Lane County Republican Central Committee each month since April 2007, according to state campaign finance records.

Carolyn Chambers could not be reached for comment.

Chambers Communications President Scott Chambers said he is unaware of his mother’s political contributions and the station would have given Dancer a similar send-off if he were a Democratic candidate for office.

“We felt it was very important to make it high profile so that our viewers who’d been watching him for almost 20 years (as anchor) knew that it was an important move in Rick’s career and that station management did not decide to not renew a contract or something,” he said. ...

Dancer also said he is unaware of Carolyn Chambers’ support for the party.

“Obviously I’m a news guy; I don’t know what she does with her finances and her money,” he said.

And CNNPolitics.com took note of it too:

It's not uncommon for media figures to enter politics, but the way KEZI handled the transition is unusual, said Kelly McBride, ethics group leader at the nonprofit Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Florida.

"The standard practice is that the person resigns or takes a leave of absence at least a couple of days before they make their announcement independently from the station," she said.

"The problem is that the news staff, the people who are supposed to be providing fair, distanced, clear-eyed coverage of political campaigns, apparently have been co-opted into one of their own staff members' campaigns," McBride said.

ouchie.

Yesterday the National Labor Relations Board heard arguments in a case involving the Eugene Register-Guard and its union, the Eugene Newspaper Guild, Communications Workers of America Local 37194. At issue is whether the union can use the R-G's email system in its organizing. NPR covered it this morning on Morning Edition.

As my online nom de plume might suggest, I care about sports and I have lots of strong opinions about how sports are covered.
What I don't care about is how the Blazers, Oregon or Oregon State are covered (basically, anything that comes with a buffet and a heated pressbox).
That said, I'd like to hear your opinions on how (and how well) local media outlets -- mostly daily and weekly newspapers and occasionally TV -- cover local sports. Most of what I'm interested in is how your local high school teams and small colleges are covered.
Who does a good job? Who works hard? Who just sucks and who doesn't even try?

The Spokane Spokesman-Review's Ken Sands wonders where the innovation is in newspaper designs, and points to the recent Register-Guard redesign as a case in point:

Registerguard.com, in Eugene, Ore., is attractive and easy to navigate. But there's hardly any web-original content, and the print content seems really old because the site isn't updated until noon Pacific time each day.

Note that Sands says his own paper's site is woefully overdue for a redesign, a process that's under way. He wishes there were some good sites out there because it's easier to steal someone else's ideas than come up with your own.

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.