Oregon Media Insiders

The O is chopping at its staff even further. This time it's offering its part-timers buyouts, and not just in the newsroom--building-wide. Details are still being worked out, I'm told. Stay tuned.

Update and bump: Word this morning is that publisher Fred Stickel has had "a change of heart" and has canceled the plan.

check out the story from the Portland Business Journal.

http://portland.bizjournals.com/portland/stories/2008/04/28/daily5.html?...

Remember the story of Mark Provo, the mathematician who took extreme exception (doc file) to a Sunday O piece profiling his attempts to solve Fermat's Last Theorem? WWeek got in on the act, too. Well, sad news: Provo's killed himself.

What if they stopped publishing a newspaper and nobody noticed? From reader Russell Shaw:

Death in the afternoon? Or better put, mid-morning?

Last week, I noticed that distribution of the Oregonian's mid-morning Street Final edition seemed to have halted. Noteworthy because Portland was one of the few U.S. cities that still had distribution of a daytime edition. Pretty sure Pittsburgh is the only one remaining, BTW.

I was curious about this, so I emailed O's public editor. He forwarded my note to O circ director, who sent me this, just yesterday a.m.:

Russell,

Yes, you are correct...the last Street Final edition was published Friday, February 8th. We ceased publishing the edition for the reasons you've cited. (high fuel costs to distribute)

We do publish two daily and Sunday editions for the metro area. One, with bigger headlines, for street sales and another for home delivery.

Thanks,

Kevin Denny
Circulation Director

P.S. The fact that so few folks noticed disappearance of Street Final is, by itself a testament to the perception that this edition- mostly a replate but a carryover from old Oregon Journal days- largely was killed because of increasing irrelevance.

I mean, some of you probably knew, but I didn't.

I noticed today that former KOIN meteorologist Dave Sweeney is now on OregonLive.com with a daily video weather segment. Is Matt Zaffino still associated with The Oregonian's forecasts?

I know he's no Kulo fan (who is?) and he is ready to lead the lynch mob against Neal (who isn't?). But isn't this over the top — especially since it involves granting some measure of veracity to anything Lars says?

Just a sample of Steve's snarl:

WWeek and Poynter are reporting that O Managing Editor Steve Engelberg is leaving. From Poynter:

Paul E. Steiger, editor-in-chief of ProPublica, a non-profit newsroom producing journalism in the public interest, today announced the appointment of Stephen Engelberg as managing editor. Mr. Engelberg is a managing editor of the Portland Oregonian and the former investigative editor of The New York Times. The appointment is effective January 1. ...

ProPublica will have the largest news staff in American journalism devoted solely to investigative reporting, with include roughly 25 fulltime reporters and editors, when fully staffed in 2008. ProPublica will be supported entirely by philanthropy and will provide the articles it produces, free of charge, both through its own Web site and to leading news organizations selected with an eye toward maximizing the impact of each article.

Mr. Steiger said, "Steve Engelberg brings great strengths -- terrific and varied experience, unquestioned integrity, a passion for meaningful journalism in the public interest -- to ProPublica. I'm delighted to have him as a partner in this endeavor, and I look forward to working with him to recruit the best possible group of reporters, editors and researchers."

WW adds:

[O]ne reporter with The Oregonian said the paper's staff was stunned when they got the email today from Editor Sandy Rowe about Engelberg's move. The newsroom insider said many colleagues were disappointed because Engelberg had regularly pushed staff to do better work.

"The reaction was 'Holy Shit,"' said the reporter.

No word on who might replace Engelberg as one of the paper's three managing editors. The other two are Therese Bottomly and Michael Arrieta-Walden.

Let the jockeying for position begin!

Being a science fiction fan of long standing, I'm used to the vox populi passing some sort of less-than-respectful judgement on me, my friends, the lifestyle I lead...I'm usually a socially inept loser who blogs from their parent's basement, obsessed with statistics and trivia and delusions of being a spaceship captain.

For the purpose of disclosure, I am blogging from a basement, but it's my basement in my house.

WWeek reports today that The O's circulation numbers are down...:

...about 1.2 percent on Sundays, to 371,000 copies, and about 0.4 percent weekdays, to 309,000. ... These are the first numbers since the O launched its extra special newsstand-only edition in June, designed to capture pedestrians’ pocket change with huge photos and sexy (ick) headlines that pump up sports, woodland creatures, rape and TV reruns.

As opposed to, say, Brazilian wax jobs.

Remember the call the O put out to get people to write for them for free? Here are the folks who volunteered.