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.

These facts may be easy to dismiss as a remnant of a bygone era. But understanding some of the state’s and city’s past can help clear the lens through which we view current events.

Recently news reports have featured a controversy happening in my neighborhood concerning gentrification and bike lanes on North Williams Avenue. Some African Americans have said that plans to remove a lane of traffic on Williams is just the latest slight on a black community in Oregon that too often has been a victim of disinvestment and dislocation.

Bike lanes? Really? It seems to be such a small trivial issue. However, if you know more about local history the picture may be a little clearer.

Many people know about the 1948 Vanport floods that displaced thousands of African American residents into the Albina neighborhood of North/Northeast Portland. It’s also well known that in the preceding years a series of mid-century urban renewal projects, like Memorial Coliseum, I-5, the Fremont Bridge and the Emanuel Hospital expansion demolished some 1,376 homes in the area and pushed African Americans up into the Northeast Alberta Street neighborhood.

But there’s more to it than that. And for the sake of length and focus, I’ll just go into the history that pertains to African Americans.

The state’s history begins in 1844 with the Oregon “Lash Law” which stated that all blacks in Oregon, free or slave, would be whipped twice a year “until he or she shall quit the territory.” The law was later replaced with an outright ban on blacks and the state entered the Union in 1859 with the only such constitutional provision.

It should be understood that black exclusion laws were not unheard of at the time. California had gone through a failed black exclusion movement of its own. Many Oregon settlers came from midwestern states like Missouri, Indiana and Michigan that had forms of black exclusion laws themselves. Those few Oregonians I’ve met who know about the black exclusion laws say they understood it was done to avoid confronting slavery, during a time when the issue was driving the country to civil war.

However, Oregon was no border state, and if the point was simply to avoid taking a stance on slavery, it’s odd that the state didn’t remove its black exclusion clause until 1926.

In the 1920s, Oregon briefly had more chapters of the Ku Klux Klan than any other state west of the Rockies. Portland State University’s Darrell Millner, a professor of black studies, once stated that blacks had gotten the point that Oregon “was not a place where blacks were going to be welcomed.”

Still, the railroads hired African Americans and throughout the first half of the century a small community cropped up in Portland around Union Station and nearby properties such as the Golden West Hotel.

That is, until World War II, when the Kaiser shipyards literally brought thousands of African American workers from the South into the Vanport public housing community in present-day Delta Park in North Portland. Vanport, then the second largest city in Oregon, was literally wiped off the map when a dike failed and the Columbia River overflowed its banks. In the aftermath, thousands of African American residents moved into Albina.

North/Northeast Portland languished under the discriminatory bank lending practice known as Redlining. Some may know that the Carter Administration first addressed this issue nationally in the 1970s. But Redlining was still in wide-scale practice in Portland until the 1990s when it was finally exposed by an investigative series in The Oregonian. Shortly after that, gentrification in the area began to build up steam, resulting in what is now almost total displacement of the African American community.

Most recently, in the ’80s and ’90s, Portland was home to white separatist, neo-Nazi and skinhead groups such as the Ayran Nation, East Side Pride and the American Front. A highly publicized 1988 murder of Ethiopian immigrant Mulugeta Seraw by skinheads was a wake-up call to many. As far as I know there hasn’t been a cross-burning in Portland in almost ten years.

Since the turn of this century Portland has secured itself a far different narrative, one that presents  Oregon and Portland as home to environmental defenders, avant-garde DIYers and outdoor recreationalists.

I do not wish to detract from the state’s admirable qualities. But, to go forward as the pioneering state that Oregon has every potential to be, I believe one must have a clear, honest and ultimately compassionate understanding of the past. For they say that those who do not heed the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them. [update- The Fair Housing Council of Oregon reported this year that there was a 65% discrimination rate against blacks and latinos in Portland's rental housing market. Earlier reports showed a 70% discrimination rate in Beaverton and 78% in Ashland. Portland Housing Commissioner Nick Fish responded to the report, in part, by firing the Fair Housing Council.]

But, today is today. This morning I walked out my door and had the good fortune to interview some of my African American neighbors in Dawson Park about all the good things they remembered about growing up in this area in the 1950s. To my surprise, I’ve spoken to many who’ve said Portland was a wonderful place to grow up. At the same time, I won’t be surprised that after years of racial pressure someone in the area is upset about something like a bike lane.

As I go forward, I’ll keep looking for the positive things. I’ll keep loving Oregon, warts and all, for what it is. And I’ll remain steadfast in my belief that with a clear-headed view, things can still get better, the next time around.

[George Rede's Notes]

Cornelius Swart is a freelance reporter and media consultant. He is currently J-Lab grant coordinator for The Oregonian News Network.  His documentary “NorthEast Passage: The Inner City and the American Dream” premiered on Oregon Public Broadcasting in 2002. He is currently researching for a new project on Oregon’s racial history.

In the eight months I’ve had the pleasure of sitting next to and working with Cornelius, I’ve been impressed by how easily he moves between the worlds of traditional mainstream media and indie website operators, a reflection no doubt of his experience as publisher of The Sentinel, a multimedia news service that covered North/Northeast Portland, and his own deep dives into cyberspace. He is a coordinator, collaborator and creative thinker of the first degree. And then there’s that rakish hat.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

"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.”

The city Bureau of Development Services held a pre-application conference on the project Oct. 21, but public notice of the conference was not seen by activists until two days beforehand. At an Oct. 19 meeting of the Forest Park Neighborhood Association, whose boundaries include the proposed site at Northwest Skyline and Hawkins roads, the topic didn’t even come up.

Fernandez, who served on the city’s Public Utility Review Board from 2000 to 2008, wonders how the new reservoirs fit into the Water Bureau’s long-range plan to replace its open reservoirs. Construction is underway on a 50 million gallon underground water tank at Powell Butte, and plans for storing 25 million gallons at a new facility at Kelly Butte are in the works. The Mount Tabor reservoirs will be phased out by 2015 and the Washington Park reservoirs will be repurposed, retrofitted or disconnected by 2020.

Hall said the project was first identified in a study conducted in 1987 and has been in subsequent planning documents throughout the 1990s. The storage tanks are shown on Page 180 of the Water Bureau’s 185-page budget for 2010-11.

The land was the subject of a highly publicized condemnation that concluded in 2003. After a 10-year court battle, the city of Portland paid Richard and Gayanne Courter $596,000 for the property, which is part of a 12-acre lot that the Courters had hoped to make into home sites. The bureau must build on the land by 2014 or option it back to the Courters for repurchase.

Richard Courter can’t comment on the issue under the conditions of his court settlement, except to say, “Where are they getting the money to build it?”

Floy Jones says the money is coming from your water bill. She’s been scrutinizing Water Bureau doings for years as a retired Mount Tabor resident and member of the Friends of Reservoirs, a volunteer group that advocates for the protection of the city’s five historic open-air water basins in Washington and Mount Tabor parks.

“Over the last two years, there’s been a net effect of a 34 percent increase in your water bill,” said Jones. “And there’s going to be another 63 percent increase over the next five years.”

That increase in the water cost portion of the bill does not reflect the total impact on ratepayers, she said, because the Water Bureau has also been raising a base billing fee at a similar pace. Last year, both the water and base charges rose 13 percent, she said.

Jones says those rate increases are happening in part because the bureau continues to build new infrastructure, like a contentious $100 million UV filtration system, at a time when water usage in on the decline.

According to bureau statistics, despite the region’s population growth, average daily demand for water has been declining by 6.5 percent since its peak in 1986.

Activists complain of lack of transparency at the massive agency. The bureau has a $250 million annual budget, with $53 million set aside for next year’s capital projects. Not only does it control Mount Hood’s Bull Run reservoir and the Columbia South Shore aquifer, it maintains 2,000 miles of pipe, 60 pumping stations and more than 70 holding tanks. It’s a major regional wholesaler to cities in Washington and Clackamas counties, providing service to nearly 900,000 people or a quarter of the state’s population.

That’s a big organization to stand up to. Friends of Reservoirs and more than 20 organizations like the Sierra Club and Oregon Wild oppose city plans for capping open reservoirs even in the face of increasing federal concerns about the city’s water supply security and for contamination.

Despite years of bitter opposition, that battle seems all but lost.

“It’s going to cost $1 billion to cap those reservoirs,” said Jeff Boly a neighborhood activist from Arlington Heights. Boly said the relatively tiny tank slotted for Forest Park is part of a ratepayer-fed gravy train that’s run off the rails. “It’s part of expanding a system that doesn’t need expanding. The bottom line is that we have a system that’s been working for 100 years.”

Forest Park Neighborhood resident Carol Pariulis, on the other hand, doesn’t go much for Water Bureau politics. She lives directly across the street from the Forest Park site. Those tanks were originally slated to be above ground, and would have blocked Pariulis’ sweeping West Hill views. To her, that much of the project has improved.

Still, she doesn’t understand exactly what the tanks are for. Claims that the project will ease water pressure imbalances don’t seem to wash.

“I’ve lived here 20 years and never had a problem with water pressure,” said Pariulis. “I guess if I know where the water is going, it might be easier to swallow.”

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.

By 2008, Washington had the second largest gay caucus in the nation.

The Columbian has described Moeller as “tenacious” and “among the state’s hardest-working legislators,” who’s worked to protect services and programs for vulnerable citizens.

With jobs being the first issue on every campaign list, Moeller points to the fact that he helped get Referendum 51 to voters this November. The referendum promises to create some 36,000 new jobs through a $3 billion bond measure to upgrade and weatherize public schools.

Moeller has fought to increase revenue for state programs. This year, he reinstituted a program that recouped millions in vehicle registration fees from Vancouver residents who register their cars across the river in Oregon. He’s also backed a controversial $300 million temporary tax on soda, candy and bottled water that he says was necessary to help fill the state’s $12 billion biannual budget shortfall.

Given that, Moeller also believes the state is too dependent on sales tax revenue. He supports Bill Gates Sr.’s Initiative 1098, which would create the state’s first income tax for individuals earning more than $200,000 a year and would cut statewide property taxes by 20 percent.

However, his unapologetic, pro-tax stance has made him a target for conservatives and voters frustrated by the recession. His opponents have labeled him the “Taxman.” Even Moeller admits he’s more vulnerable than he’s ever been, but that people just assume he’ll always be there.

“In some ways I think I’m such a fixture,” says Moeller. “They think, ‘Oh, Jim, you’re going to win,’ so they don’t get involved in the campaign.”

Moeller states that you don’t have to be a Washington resident to help the campaign.

“People can volunteer, make phone calls, make donations,” he says. While Moeller does make public appearances encouraging gay citizens to become more involved in politics, he says it’s not limited to the LGBT community.

“Everyone should be more involved.”

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.

While Enzyme did lots great profiles and lifestyle reports, Lew really wanted the staff reporters, Matt Singer and I, to do investigative and analytical work.

Before the publication launched I decided to stop in at the offices of a half a dozen local politicians and ask them a few questions about what they felt was lacking in today’s news coverage.  My assumption was that the press is an institutional instrument of democracy. The Press sometimes works in contest and sometimes works in concert with the government. To me this is not unlike the natural balance/conflict of powers that the founding fathers set up between the separate branches of government.  I felt that, before Enzyme started, it was important to ‘cross the aisle’ so to speak, and get the government’s POV.

To my surprise folks in government said two things: first “you guys just sensationalize everything” (shocker), the second was that today’s news coverage lacked depth, analysis and context. Interesting.

As a further digression, I was also surprised by how many of the government PR people were happy to see me back at the job.  I don’t know if they were lonely, or what. More than one PR person said in whispered tones, “You guys have to keep us honest.”

Anyway…

Given that many folks I’ve talked with, in and out of government and media seem to want “depth and analysis” in coverage, Lew had a good vision for the magazine when it launched.  An Atlantic Magazine for Portland we sometimes said…

To that end, I think we did some good work. I believes my stories questioning the regions priorities about Jobs Vs Livability , Metro’s 12K acre Urban Growth Boundary gaff in Damascus and the City’s possible tax grab of neighborhood dollars for a Rose Quarter redevelopment were good examples of stories that were moderate, fair, analytical and contextual.

But who cares if the stories are good if no one sees them?

Enzyme was pulling in about 400-500 hundred unique visits a day.  While we had some great readers, including some very smart folks (and lots of Asians) we just didn’t have enough. The publications traffic forecast when we closed was that it would take over 5 years to build up enough traffic to become sustainable.

While still, it’s really hard to come to any conclusions after 60 days… Lew may have seen the light of day and the long hard road ahead him. With a second dip into recession, lower than expected site performance, and after our reporting, a whiff of the historically under performing Portland business climate, I think Lew might have gotten spooked and decided to cut his losses.

To the heart of the matter is that: quality + free content = risky business

After five years as a small-scale publisher of a free content rag and website,  I have long since disabused myself of the belief that simply producing quality content will attract a supportive enough audience .

It takes more than just quality to make a business work.

One of the oldest rules in business, in my view, quality is a function of price.

The tricks of the trade that make a many publication work are far less glamorous and not nearly as ideologically inspiring as ‘quality journalism’.  Marketing, target audience demographics and keeping your costs down are sadly, the fundamentals that often get swept aside in the rush get one’s work out there.

The Internet, Search, Social Media and the Viral Effect will not raise general interest publications like Enzyme to the top of the market place, anymore than they will repeal the laws of gravity.  Of course…in quantum anything is possible, but that doesn’t mean it’s likely.

The publisher’s game hasn’t really changed in that respect. You can’t lose sight of the business.

Working with Lew taught me a lot about writing and reporting. It was a tremendous privilege to work with him, even for a short time.  To that end, my time at Enzyme was a worthy experiment.  I’ve done some of my best work there.  Lew had the guts to put his money and his business where his dreams were. But it also taught me that many of my closely held beliefs as a publisher were right on.

To Lew- I tip the hat.

As for me, it’s onto the next experiment.

The old story is that Thomas Edison went through over 1,000 different filaments before discovering the right one for the light bulb.  At one point his assistant said, “We’ve tried a 1,000 times. It’s time we give up. We haven’t learned anything!”

“Of course we have,” replied Edison. “We’ve learned a thousand ways in which it doesn’t work.”

sigh…yes… ok, that’s all for now.

I shall return.

(that last bit is MacArthur, not Edison)