Perhaps the bumper sticker should say, “Keep Portland White”

Photo by Severen Sadjina http://www.flickr.com/photos/sadjina/

Post appeared on George Rede’s blog RoughandRede, August 31 as a part of his Voices of August guest post series. It appeared under the headline “Oregon’s Unique Racial History.”

They say that those who do not learn the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them. So, it’s always been a little alarming to me how few people know about Oregon’s unique racial history.

I think many who live here view Portland as a progressive place governed by thoughtful public policy. Portland likes to think of itself as home to innovative and inclusive creative residents. Given that most people know that Portland is very white. At 78 %, it’s one of the whitest major cities in America. Its core neighborhoods are actually getting whiter (topping the nation at 74 %). Yet few I’ve met seem to see an inconsistency in the city’s lack of diversity and the rhetoric of “celebrating diversity” we often proclaim.

“Why would black people event want to come here?“ a young creative type (and a fellow reporter)  once asked during a conversation about Oregon’s pioneer history and the lack of early black migration to the area.

“They came looking for opportunity just like everyone else,” I said. “But they were told that they weren’t allowed to live here.”

Oregon was the only state to enter the Union with a constitutional exclusion on African American residents. Less than 65 years ago The National Journal of Social Work declared Portland the most discriminatory city outside the Deep South. The state did not ratify the Fifteen Amendment (giving blacks the right to vote) until 1959.

Future of newspapers, in a nutshell, a German one

Much ink and blood has been spilled  regarding where newspapers are going in this new post-craigslist digital age. There is a sense that the ‘wild west’ days of internet news is slowly settling down. The era when there were no rules (that led to endless excite and at least academically interesting experiments) is ending.  A new norm is starting to set in for many online publications. While that doesn’t mean folks like The Oregonian are out of the woods. But there is a sense, there, and I think in general that things are not simply in bottomless free fall anymore.  That doesn’t mean dinosaurs in legacy media will be saved. Or, that they at least won’t see radical change in the coming years. But, I feel, there is, some hope that newspaper in general, or as large media operations will survive to the point where they will not have to gut their long format an investigative journalism in the way that TV news killed the long format TV doc in the 1970s.  That’s just my feeling, today 6.28.11.  The clip here is from a strange, strange German video show that has a bonkers intro.  I cannot understand at all, (save for the brilliant phrase “ignorance and arrogance”). However about 90 seconds in, there is a shoot and pray video interview with digijourno guru Jeff Jarvis about the future of journalism. It’s very short and very concise and the best brief for my money you can get on the state of affairs, as they currently sit. All that in about eight minutes.

Freelance: In St. Johns, the volunteer Foot Patrol is resurrected and cops walk the beat, too

THE OREGONIAN May 27th, 2011

Members of the St. Johns Mainstreet Foot Patrol walk through the community's downtown during the program's first night.

On a rainy Thursday night in April, three volunteers with the St. Johns Mainstreet Foot Patrol clad in yellow vests — and armed only with cellphones, flashlights and a digital camera — made their way through the town center.

Crime in St. Johns has fallen steadily during the past four years, but recent events have some people feeling a sense of relapse to the years when the area was know for little other than neglect and street drinkers. The neighborhood has been hit hard by the recession, and graffiti, prostitution and vagrants have returned.

And while some signs of economic recovery are taking hold, the community’s civic pride hasn’t fully recovered from the 2008 closure of the Police Bureau’s North Precinct. Combined with a recent spate of gang shootings citywide, many simply don’t feel safe downtown at night.

So when the foot patrol volunteers made their way past bus stops and shops, they received an almost heroic welcome from the neighborhood.

Local merchant Randy Plew of Plew’s Brews on North Lombard Street wraps a volunteer in bear hug as the patrol passes.

“Thank you,” gushes 34-year-old Angela Cobb, who says she’s frequently harassed by men looking for prostitutes. “This (foot patrol) means a lot to me.”

The patrol’s impact is reaching even beyond residents and local merchants. Portland police were so impressed they decided to support the effort by doing something they haven’t done in years — walk the beat themselves.

“They are really motivated people,” says Stephanie Reynolds, of the type of gritty volunteers who typically make up such foot patrols. Reynolds, program coordinator for the city’s Crime Prevention Program, helps support the dozen or so foot patrols in Portland and but had never heard of one getting the police to walk the beat.

But she’s not surprised. “They are the type of people who want to get things done.”

Read the rest of the story at OregonLive.

Official J-Lab project blog launches, program to give cash to bloggers

cash-in dearie

This week we officially named the J-Lab project The Oregonian News Network.  Yes, yes, the acronym is ONN, which makes me think of the Onion News Network, but nothing’s perfect. There’s a new official ONN blog, where I’ll be posting program updates and announced today that we’ll be awarding the first seven Pilot Partners $2,500 a piece to take part in the program.

“The ONN will first work to organize a strong and consistent group of initial partners. To help do that, we are awarding $2,500 to up to seven Pilot Partner bloggers.  These Pilot Partners will be a combination of hyperlocals and beat bloggers from around the region and state. The cash will serve a number of purposes. First, it’s part of J-Lab’s mission to support existing indie news producers.  Second, we’ll still be working out the kinks on the program, and Pilot Partners will be live beta testers. Lastly, we’d like to have the freedom to do something experimental, a-la Pipeline, at later stages in the program. So if that put some demands on partner time, we want them compensated.”

The program is moving along merrily. I hope to have things in place next week so we can start working with our very first pilot partner.  I’ve been at the job a month and we’re only now getting a pilot partners up and running. Things sometimes move  slowly at the O. It’s a large organization and one of the largest papers to try this J-Lab experiment. Still everyone is very nice and easy to work with. The reporters seem supportive of the project when I get the chance to explain how it will actually work.  In general, folks are very cool, even if you do have to wait behind this guy if you want to get something in the break-room.

The Oregonian to play nice with local bloggers and independent news site.

Mark Lynch. www.cartoons-a-plenty.com

In this Post

Cornelius gets a new job

What is J-Lab?

Working at the Oregonian

Burying the lead: what’s in it for me, how to get involved

A new job

Greetings from the Death Star!  I’m sitting at my new desk inside the largest newsroom in the Pacific Northwest: The Oregonian. Yes, that’s right. Cornelius Swart: scrappy publisher, reporter and master of the pan-flute, has taken a job with The Man!

Well more of a contract than a job to be exact. A few weeks ago I came on board as the new project Coordinator for The Oregonian’s Networked Journalism Project. Over the next year I’ll be working to create partnerships between The Oregonian/OregonLive and hyperlocal, beat and topic bloggers from around the state. The program will attempted to get bloggers and the paper working together in a cooperative and mutually beneficial way. To do that the program will promote hyperlocal and beat blogger stories through the OregonLive website as well as provide trainings aimed at sharpening journalism  and business skills. There could be other ways to work together. The program is just getting started. Personally, I’m pretty excited about working with the indie community that I’ve known for so long AND the incredible news professionals here at The Oregonian (the biggest newsroom in the Pacific Northwest , did I mention that all ready?)

What is J-Lab?

The Networked Journalism Project  is part of a national effort funded by American University’s J-Lab Institute for Interactive Journalism and the Knight Foundation. It’s a one year pilot program. Last year J-Lab funded Networked Journalism projects at the Seattle Times, Charlotte Observer, the Miami Herald and in Asheville NC and Tucson AZ. This year, The Oregonian, SF public radio station KQED, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and Lawrence Journal World (Kan.) all received grants.

It’s a big opportunity for me in particular. For several years while I was publishing the hyperlocal paper The Sentinel, I was also involved in a non-profit think- tank called Portland Media Lab.  In 2008, PML published a list of recommendations for improving the local news ecosystem  (see items C-F). We tried to implement some of the ideas at the Sentinel, but never really had the resources (read: time and money) to get anything significant off the ground.

So I was excited when I heard The Oregonian had stepped up to the J-Lab plate and put its considerable audience and “resources” into the project. For me, its a chance to put some of PML’s ideas into action.

Working at The Oregonian

The folks here at the O have been really nice to me. I’ve gotten to meet quiet a few people already. It’s been reassuring to see that when it comes down to it, journalists are all journalists, whether they work in huge newsrooms or from their laptops in coffee shops. The folks here are well aware of the paper’s old reputation as “The Death Star” and that some independents may be wary of working with them.

Obviously The Oregonian has had to adapt to the new media world. Circulation at the paper has declined approximately 15 percent since 2008. That’s far better than many in the industry.  However, with a daily print circulation of 250,000 and with an online site that gets roughly 2.26 million unique monthly visits and over 22 million page views,  the O remains a large operation. So suspicions by the independent community seem natural.

To that end, the O seems committed to a genuine partnership. They went out of their way to recruit someone like me from the indie community. They put my desk at the Portland Team section to loop me into the newsroom, while at the same time advising me to be an “advocate for the bloggers”.

For my part, I’m going to do my best to provide lots of communication about the program each step of the way.

Burying the lead: what’s in it for me, how to get involved

So, without much more ado…no wait, a little more ado…more…little more…ok

What will the project look like?

At first the program will focus on partnering with hyperlocal news sites, then beat bloggers, then topic blogs. In Seattle, blog headlines appear on the Seattle Times home page [below the ‘fold’ under Local News Partners] and RSS feeds on this local channel. Major headlines are curated and promoted to the homepage by the Seattle Times editors and drive serious traffic to partner sites. The program in Seattle has been very success. It started last year with just 5 hyperlocal sites and now has over 27, with more topic based sites still being added.

All the programs across the country involve story promotion.

[BELOW THE SEATTLE TIMES EXPLAINS THEIR PROJECT]

Isn’t that just aggregation?

The short answer is, well, from the outside… yes, it looks like aggregation. But from the J-Lab, and newsroom POV, I think there is a very deliberate effort to avoid simply scraping people’s headlines a-la-the old HuffPo model.  I think this program aspires to be a real newsroom partnership where reporters, editors and bloggers work in a peer-to-peer fashion to bring the most important local news to the widest possible audience.

Typically these programs also include trainings and workshops. As a former publisher and small businessman whose clients were small businesses; I’m going to take a special interest in the business training aspect.

I’m aware that indie news producers are generally swamped with their own daily operations. So we’ll have to make sure anything this program does, won’t significantly add to partner workload. Having said that, I would envision holding journalism trainings about legal rights and freedom of the press, public record search techniques, deep search and semantic web and maximizing social media tools for journalism.

Editorially speaking, there are lots of possibilities. Last year, The Seattle Times and blog partners teamed up on coordinated coverage of issues like graffiti and homelessness. This year the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette is designing its entire J-Lab partnership around issue driven collaborations. I can’t wait to see what a local story collaborative here in Oregon might look like.

What’s in it for The Oregonian?

Well, nothing is set in stone. This is an experiment. That’s why it’s grant funded. The general sentiment from the O and folks at the Seattle Times, The Charlotte Observer, KQED and Pittsburgh Post-Gazzette ect is that the J-Lab experiment is part of their journalistic mission to provide information in the public interest.

Specifically, The Oregonian launched over 20 new hyperlocal  focused pages on OregonLive last year. These pages are providing an increasing amount of neighborhood focused staff reporting. They also allow readers to post their own news and events directly to these community pages. Networked Partner links and headlines promoted in these pages would be a natural fit and would help connect quality local independent reporting with the sizable audience that OregonLive can attract.

Personally, I think the benefits will also come with providing readers additional resources and ‘value add’.  As many of us know, being a successful online voice, whether you are in social media or traditional blogosphere, is as much about referring people to quality content, as it is about producing quality content yourself.  It’s all part of being a trusted source for your readers.

Big Finish

What does this have to do with The Future of Journalism?

Well, who knows. But one modern vision is that “the news” today is made up of professional journalists, indie and citizen reporters, and the wiki-masses of cell phone empowered citizens who produce viral reports and capture events like the Egyptian Revolution. Taken together these things constitute what has traditionally been called “the fourth estate” or the news media’s ability to put a check on political power. My hope is that partnerships like this J-Lab project can help the mainstream and independent news media develop new cooperative models that allow both forms to stabilize and flourish.

Hold on. I have to put this soapbox back under my desk. Just a sec. The folks at the O were nice enough to let me bring it in here, but they told me…the told me specifically, that I had to keep it out of the way when I was done…there…ok

If you would like to know more about the project, The Oregonian will hold a program orientation and discussion session on Saturday March 12th at 2pm, 1320 SW Broadway, fourth floor, Portland. Digital Journalism Portland will sponsor a second discussion on Tuesday March 22nd, at 7pm, at the Canvass Art Bar & Bistro, 1800 NW Upshur St., Portland.

For details call or contact me at cswart@oregonian.com,  503-221-8072, or stay tuned to this blog [Updated 2.28.11- The official project blog has launched so you can go there TheOregonianNewsNetwork], or follow the tweets @corneliusrex

That’s all from for now.

May the force be with you!

Cornelius

Freelance: The rise of debtor’s prisons?

WILLAMETTE WEEK December 15, 2010
Is Washington County part of a national return of jailing people for debt

Winford Parish never imagined his $1,800 in outstanding court debt to Washington County would land him in prison for two years.

In 2007, a judge convicted the 39-year-old man of manufacturing marijuana. Judge Gayle Nachtigal gave him a second chance and suspended his 28-month sentence to five years’ probation.

But on Oct. 25 of this year, sheriff’s deputies hauled him into Judge Kirsten Thompson’s court for consistent failure to pay court-ordered financial obligations as part of his probation.

When the unemployed father told Thompson he could not pay fines for things such as court-appointed attorney fees, prosecutor Jason Weiner told Parish he could have recycled soda cans for money. Parish is now in Coffee Creek Correctional Facility in Wilsonville.

Some say Parish is an extreme example of a judicial practice in Oregon’s second-largest county of leveling court fines and fees against homeless, unemployed and poor people—then incarcerating them when they don’t pay.

“Court fees are crushing people who are already struggling in this economy,” says Dean Smith, Washington County office chief of the nonprofit Metropolitan Public Defenders. “People get on probation that have no hope of meeting the conditions.”

If that all seems straight out of a 19th-century debtor’s prison, there’s an Oct. 3 report by the American Civil Liberties Union that says such practices are increasingly common nationwide and that they violate the U.S. Constitution.

“Day after day, indigent defendants are imprisoned for failing to pay legal debts they can never hope to manage,” according to the report “In for a Penny: The Rise of America’s New Debtor’s Prisons.”

Read the story at WWeek.com

Freelance: The Defense of Parents Act

THE JUST OUT: November 19th, 2010
Courts look to conclude same-sex parenting case after four years of legal drama

Many applauded when the Oregon Supreme Court ruled last year that same-sex couples who undergo artificial insemination have the same parental rights as married ones. The court stated that when a lesbian couple decides to inseminate, the non-birth partner is a legal parent of the child(ren), in the same way that a husband who consents to insemination is also a legal parent. Groups such as Basic Rights Oregon and the American Civil Liberties Union held it a clear victory for equal rights.
On November 17 two women returned to a Multnomah County courtroom in what both hope will be the final act in a legal drama that’s played out for almost four years. While the courts have determined that in some cases lesbian couples can be treated like married ones, they haven’t determined if this lesbian couple can be. Meanwhile, the fate of two children is at stake. As far as the kids are considered, the civil rights war may have been won, but the battle between Sondra Shineovich and Sarah Kemp isn’t over yet.

A question of blood and intent
At the heart of the issue are two children, who for the purposes of this report will be called Paul and Agatha. Their biological mother, Sarah Kemp, and Kemp’s former partner, Sondra Shineovich, were together for 10 years. During that time they conceived two children through artificial insemination. Or did they?
READ THE ARTICLE

Freelance assignment: New reservoir rouses suspiscion

"No tanks," say some Water Bureau watchdogs

THE NORTHWEST EXAMINER, November 2010

Plans to install two underground reservoirs along Northwest Skyline Boulevard have surprised many local residents and raised the suspicion of Portland Water Bureau watchdogs.

While the Water Bureau said that the two new tanks are needed to provide adequate water pressure at higher levels in the West Hills, reservoir activists say they’ve been kept in the dark about a project they believe will do little more than raise water rates.

The Water Bureau asserts that the $7 million project, with a combined capacity of 3.3 million gallons, is needed to help equalize water pressure to homes between West Burnside Street and Northwest Germantown Road that are also between 900 and 1,200 feet above sea level. They will also provide water for fire fighting. The area is currently served by three above-ground water towers.

In mid-October, city crews began clearing blackberry brambles and took soil samples at the 1.6-acre project site. The first of the two reservoirs will break ground in April 2012, and the second at an unspecified date.

“Once we have design [work] done to about 30 to 60 percent, we’ll take them to the neighborhood for comment,” said Water Bureau spokesman Tim Hall. “We don’t anticipate that for another six months.”

The project must obtain a conditional-use permit, with mitigation measures tailored to address its negative impacts.

Still, news of a new Water Bureau project set [ME1] chins wagging amongst activists, who were unaware of the project.

“I’ve been working with the Water Bureau for 15 years, but this is the first time I’ve ever heard of it,” said Scott Fernandez, who holds a master’s in drinking water quality from Washington State University. “I’ve gone through the budget hearings. This is news to me.”

Freelance assignment: Moeller Time

THE JUST OUT: Oct 15th, 2010
Vancouver’s pioneering legislator faces an uphill battle

The Jackie Robinson of Washington State’s gay politicians is on the ropes. Jim Moeller, 55, has been in government since 1995, when he became the first openly gay elected official in Washington State history. Now seeking his fourth term as House Representative for Vancouver’s District 49, he faces his toughest election yet. His opponent, Republican Craig Riley, has been riding a national wave of popular discontent. Moeller says that for the first time, he’s got an opponent who’s challenging him on the issues and not on the fact that he’s gay.

In mid-October The Columbian, Clark County’s largest newspaper, endorsed Moeller’s opponent. It’s the first time in his career that Moeller didn’t win their endorsement. Moeller’s gone from being a pioneer to working in one of the country’s most gay-friendly legislatures. Considering that, and the “enthusiasm gap” among his constituents, one has to wonder if Moeller isn’t being taken for granted this election cycle.

In 1995, when Moeller won a seat in the Vancouver City Council, he was the state’s first gay elected official. In 2002, he went to Olympia as a state representative and became the first gay elected leader in the state house.

“Maybe it was a chiffon ceiling?” posesMoeller, playfully considering what it was like to break through the velvet ceiling.

Moeller remembers it wasn’t easy being gay in Vancouver. In the late ’80s and early ’90s, hanging out at bars like the North Bank Tavern, he and his friends were routinely harassed or attacked.

But Moeller believes an effort to defeat a 1992 Oregon ballot measure that would have excluded sexual minorities from state programs and funding helped educate Vancouver residents about gay rights.

“Because we’re all in the same media market, we got all that information,” says Moeller. “If it hadn’t been for that campaign I would never have gotten elected. I got a lot of hate mail when I was running. But it all stopped the moment I got elected.”

When he made it to Olympia in 2002, few batted an eye.

“People were more surprised that I was gay from Vancouver more than anything else,” says Moeller.

The myth of quality and free content

It’s official, EnzymePdx, the online news magazine closed last Friday , after exactly 60 days of publication. I worked as a part-time staff writer there since the launch and now have the distinction of having seen two online publications shut down on me in so many months (the Sentinel officially closed in August). Start-ups can live fast and die young, doubly so for news start-ups I guess.

The fact that Enzyme closed was no surprise – everyone knew it was a high risk venture to hire a fully staffed newsroom driven web magazine in the shallows of a recession. What was shocking was how quickly it folded.

In my view there are a common errors that can often happen when a journalist tries to launch an Internet publication. These mistakes are so common that I shared them with Lew Serviss, former New York Times editor or 10 years, and publisher of Enzyme, a few days before start-up. But the biggest trap of them all is what I call the myth of quality content.

Lew Serviss, publisher and editor was one of the best people I’ve ever worked for. He is considerate, thoughtful, and a gentle taskmaster.  As an editor he was great- The New York Times hires no fools obviously. As an assigning editor, Lew made things look easy- he’d suggest a story that would sound lame at first, but in the end would turn out to be a scorcher.  He had an amazingly refined BS detector. He intuitively knew where the stories were and where the story WEREN’T (even though he was new to town.)  As a story editor he was like a master barber. He could give your story a trim (or even a major overhaul) and when he was done it seemed like nothing had changed anything at all.

But, as a publisher Lews he was a believer in that adage that seems to underpin so many ad driven free content news start-ups: if you write quality stories and do good journalism the audience will find you.  I’ve heard this all the time in my years as Sentinel publisher and through conversations about new journalism at www.portlandmedialab.com. Most of the time I held my tongue and never said, “Well if that was true the New York Times would be made in the shade.”

While the Internet allows almost anyone to gather an audience, it does not, at this time, allow you to sustainable revenue – if content is the only method for drawing a crowd.