Willamette Week gets the rest of the Caldwell story

The Caldwell story just gets worse and worse. Much worse than depicted in my earlier post.

And the egg piles up on the face of The Oregonian and its editors.

The current Willamette Week has vaporized the yarn about Caldwell's helping a poor PCC student buy books and pay the bills in exchange for sexual favors. Turns out the 23-year-old was a well-known on-line hooker.

Sadly, there's more. Here's the link to the WW story.

From Neil Goldschmidt raping the babysitter to Bob Caldwell's illicit sex life and unreported DUI, it makes you wonder what else the paper is hiding.

Where would we be without Willamette Week!

Sign the recall petition

I picked up a lapel button last week that reads, "Say the thing that everyone is thinking."

Mark Zusman, the editor of Willamette Week, may not have written "what everyone is thinking" in his recent editorial urging readers to sign the Adams' recall petition, but he certainly has written what I've been thinking.

See whether he has captured your own thoughts too.

If so, sign the petition.

Compare and Contrast

Willamette Week and The Oregonian have always been studies in contrast. The scrappy alternative weekly routinely scoops and embarrasses the big, cautious daily.

Think Neil Goldschmidt and Sam Adams sex stories, both WW scoops.

Today both papers ran stories about the resignation of Matthew Hanly, the headmaster of Oregon Episcopal School. You can read the Willamette Week version here and The Oregonian story here.

In its story the weekly reports that it published events leading to Monday’s resignation in a story on-line last week.

Which raises the question of whether The Oregonian would have printed the “resignation” story if Willamette Week hadn’t published its prelude.

Someone hacked e-mails that Hanly foolishly wrote on his school computer. Then the messages were anonymously sent to the papers.

The papers handled the e-mail contents in a markedly different way.

The e-mails revealed Hanly, who has been separated from his wife since September, to be gay. More than that, the e-mail correspondence included some on-line “pillow talk” between Hanly and Michael Hulshoff-Schmidt, the headmaster of the International High School in Portland.

Willamette Week chose to share explicit content with its readers in a graphic — to which I say, “Give us (to say nothing of Hanly and Hulshoff-Schmidt) a break!”

The Oregonian simply referred to the content as “flirtatious conversations with a man.” Unlike Willamette Week, The Oregonian didn’t name the man.

The resignation and the reason for it was news enough. Which is pretty much the way The Oregonian played it.

Still, curious minds wonder about The Oregonian’s omission of Hulshoff-Schmidt, who was e-mailing from work too.

The other major difference between the coverage is that Willamette Week included Hanly’s eyebrow-raising salary: $243,500 a year. No salary figure was given for Hulshoff-Schmidt.

When the dust settles from this tabloidesque yarn, it would be instructive to see how the salary of the headmaster of a private school compares to that of public school principals.

Now that has the whiff of serious news.

Some uninvited advice for The Oregonian

The Oregonian is shrinking again.

The way it is going about its slow disappearing act — and that’s what it is — says something about why it will continue to fade to nothing.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m a newspaper guy and I want to see a major news presence of Oregonian-proportions survive.

Notice that I didn’t say a major “newspaper.” That may not be possible.

But I do want a financially viable Portland news organization to emerge from the turmoil that has hit the industry. It may take some combining of resources and an entirely new methods of funding.

It will certainly take new ways of thinking.

It’s about time. For instance, it’s time for the news to be free of advertising pressures and compromises.

It may also mean the end of petty, cheap-shot competition. Journalism and journalists should have one share, and even cooperative, purpose: informing the public.

Call me crazy, but I believe The Oregonian could be the locus around which this new journalism emerges. Other journalistic “partners” could be Willamette Week, Community Newspapers and OPB.

But The Oregonian, as the big dog, is critical. And if the big dog is dying, things could fall apart quickly.

So what can The Oregonian do short-term to survive?

Here are seven recommendations.

The most recent evidence of the paper’s decline is subsuming the “Business” section into the front news section. The change says, in effect, that the “Business” section isn’t worthy of the reader’s separate consideration. Unlike, for instance, the “Sports” section, which remains very much its own entity. The message is that sports is more important than business.

Hello!

Part of the problem is in the old section’s name, “Business.” The “Business” section has evolved, or should, from being strictly about business to being about the economy. It ought to be “The Economy” section.

Recommendation #1 is to call it “The Economy” and include news about labor and personal finance as well as about business. People are talking a whole lot more about the economy these days than, say, about The Blazers. Which brings us to….

Recommendation #2. If “Sports” is worthy of its own section and massive column inches (a doubtful assumption), “The Economy” certainly is equally deserving. Its substance is nothing less than our livelihood, our well being, our savings, our sense of security.

Come to think of it, “The Economy” increasingly determines “How We Live,” (HWL) which happens to be the name of another section.

Recommendation #3. Call “How We Live” something else like “Time Out” or “The Rest of the Story” (thank you, Paul Harvey) or “UpBeat” but don’t change its content. One exception: move any HWL economy story to the new “The Economy” section.

As it turns out, I spend more time with “HWL” than any other section. That’s because of its daily publication of games. The time-sink for me is Sudoku. The reason: It’s inter-active — like the Internet, which competes for the rest of my time.

Recommendation #4. Keep the “HWL” format but consider using interactive features in other parts of the paper.

Recommendation #5. Put “Sports” at the back of “How We Live.” Clearly sports are an attraction for many folks, mostly hairy chested ones who form symbiotic relationships with sports figures.

The above recommendations likely will do little more than buy the newspaper time to create a new journalism institution. Which leads us to....

Recommendation #6. Start talking with other news organizations and institutions about the future of Portland journalism. Get over bruised or inflated egos and start to put together a plan for serving the public. Consider a quasi-public service, non-profit organization called “The Portland News Consortium.”

Recommendation #7. Challenge your readers and your own old assumptions and habits by dropping useless baggage. It can be as far-reaching as cooperating and converging with other news organizations and media, or as simple, but ethical, as announcing that the paper will cease referring to the University of Oregon/Oregon State rivalry as a war — specifically a "Civil War."

Funny business in the 'hood?

Some weeks back my neighbors alerted me to some funny business at the big white house at the corner of SW 19th and SW Boundary.

The house is just a block from my own.

The neighbors told me that when 91-year-0ld Warren Cummins died in late September, his entire estate, (which turned out to be worth nearly $900,000 including his big white rancher) was left to a caregiver. She had been on the job only three months.

As it turned out, nothing in the estate was left to Warren's step-son, Fletcher Johnson, or to Warren's three adopted children. Warren's wife had died in 2007.

The situation first caught the attention of the neighbors when the caregiver, Patricia McIntosh, moved her family into Warren's house. Later, not long after Warren had died, both McIntosh and her husband purchased new cars. Warren's Cadillac was gone, presumably a trade-in.

Something didn't smell right and my neighbors wanted me to look into it.

I know this kind of story takes time to investigate, and I didn't have enough to spare. I called my contacts at Willamette Week. They put me on to reporter James Pitkin, who dug into what had happened and what the inevitable legal fall-out has been.

The results of his reporting appear in today's issue of Willamette week. It can be found here on-line.

It's a solid piece of work. I've thanked James for doing it.

Still, the story needs to be followed. Why, for instance, is the house now vacant if Patricia McIntosh did nothing wrong as her attorney maintains? Where is the McIntosh family now? Is there reason to suspect foul play? Is this more than the civil case it has become?

I'm encouraging Pitkin to stay on the story as it unfolds — and neighbors to stay alert.

Will on-line newspapers adopt TV news values?

I took my “Mass Media and Society” class to The Oregonian and Willamette Week last night and came away more certain than ever that newspapers are in their death throes. Sure, we heard a lot of brave words about the future, but when the editors we talked to got down to specifics you could tell the ground was shaking beneath their feet — and that they had only vague ideas about what to do about it.

Convergence to screens like the ones we are staring at means that we’ll be seeing more and more video on “newspaper” web sites. In other words, newspapers will evolve into TV news programs. More and more news decisions will be driven by the demands of video’s moving, mesmerizing images. We will have less explanation and analysis and more touching, emotive “scenes” and “moments.”

The appeal will be to feelings, not thought. To haphazard, disconnected impressions, not linear, logical reasoning.

Technology is in the driver’s seat, and I for one don’t want to go where it is taking us.

The other concern at the newspapers is that the era of presses as money-making machines is over. No lucrative replacement is anywhere in sight. The Internet produces a small fraction of the revenue print did for papers. And so the forced transition of newspapers to the internet has meant smaller staffs, smaller papers, reporting on the cheap (read, crime news) and fluff.

There is no end in sight.

As I sat in its big news conference room, I imagined the hulking Oregonian building on SW Broadway housing neat insurance companies or law offices. Out with cluttered journalists’ cubicles.

As I see it, the best we can hope for are little networks and co-operatives of quasi-independent journalists who band together to market themselves and to build reputations for accuracy, fairness and compelling writing. But even they will have to compete on, and succumb to, screen images that purport to inform.

Old newspapers (and books and magazines) will be collected like typewriters, slide rules and “film” cameras.

The last print journalism to go will be the small, so-called “niche” publications. Many of them will be (and are) little more than advertising vehicles.

Then they too will give way to portable reading devices, whose photo reproductions will match, or exceed, those of the glossiest magazine. More than that, their photos will be (and are) moving pictures. Vanity Fair, Wired and The New Yorker can never match that capability within the confines of the printed page.

Finally, as the ways we are informed rapidly evolve, we, as sentient beings, will be changed. Note that we will not choose to change. The media environment will literally change us in how we relate to each other, how we make judgments, how our children learn and come of age, how we act and react, how we form our values, how we confront the future.

The speed of the change will be measured in a handful of years, perhaps even months. What took a century before, may take, at most, a decade. (Try to remember where we were in 1998.) In a single lifetime, a person will experience four or five generations remarkably dissimilar, almost alien one to another.

And above it all will be inexorable technological change whose far-flung, independent engineers and scientists will continue to be blind to, and seemingly unconcerned about, their inventions’ consequences to humanity and the planet.

Will Novick endorse Frohnmayer?

If the results for the Democratic Party’s U.S. Senate nomination hold up over night, will a losing Steve Novick endorse independent John Frohnmayer over the apparent Democratic winner, Jeff Merkley?

Novick’s concession speech might provide a different answer from the one Novick gave in a candidate interview with Willamette Week last month.

If Novick sticks with what he told Willamette Week, he could throw his support to Frohnmayer, undercutting Merkley’s chances against Sen. Gordon Smith in the three-way race.

Here is the transcript of the Willamette Week interview of the four Democratic Senate primary candidates:

WW: Steve, who would you vote for [if you could not vote for yourself]?
Novick: I would vote for John Frohnmayer.
WW: He is not in this room.
Novick: (12 second pause) I have a very hard time answering that.
WW: You are going to have to make a hell of a lot harder decisions when you are on the floor of the Senate.
Novick: (31 second pause) I'd wait several weeks because I'd want to see whether Speaker Merkley continues to run the kind of campaign he has run against me ... [subsequent details omitted]
WW: OK, given what you know now.
Novick: Given what I know now, I would vote for Candy Neville.
WW: You like Frohnmayer [inaudible].
Novick: I think John Frohnmayer, with all due respect, has presented a thorough discussion of the major issues facing the country, and his positions are extremely progressive.

Stone throwing — as predicted

Steve Clark was right about Willamette Week throwing stones at Clark's front page puff piece last week about his Portland Tribune going “daily” — on the web.

The Willies went wild with Clark's verbal dance about big changes at the Tribune, where he is president and publisher.

The contrast in tone speaks volumes about the two publications. One is comfortable with itself and where it is in the new Media World. “Smug” might be a better word.

The other is tentative, defensive and spin-prone.

If you read Willamette Week’s snide deconstruction of Clark’s “story,” you’ll figure out which is which.

None of which gets to the issues that both publications must face as print vanishes from the scene. I wrote about some of them in an earlier post.

On the web, every news site is just another URL that has to prove itself.

And pay for it.

For the record, I've bookmarked both sites. Which is more than I can say for The Oregonian, which still comes to my driveway. Old habits die hard.

Will voters take newspapers' advice and vote for Adkins?

Ruth Adkins, my choice for Portland School Board from our Zone #1, has won endorsements from every major paper: The Oregonian, The Portland Tribune, The Portland Mercury and Willamette Week.

That's a remarkable feat given that she is running against an incumbent, Doug Morgan, who is no slouch. Where Ruth beats Doug is in her passion to involve communities in decision-making and to keep neighborhood schools open.

With a bean-counter's outlook, Doug backed Portland Schools Superintendent Vicki Phillips in shutting them down during his tenure.

So now we will find out just what all those endorsements are worth. They can't hurt, but just how much will they help?

One other note about Ruth, who is a Hillsdale neighbor. She was an organizer of our Friday evening peace vigils at Sunset Boulevard and Capitol Highway. And while she could have been out knocking on doors for her campaign these past few weeks, she has reserved Friday evenings to be with us with her anti-war placard in hand.

Hers is to the point. It reads,"NO!"

She knows that money spent on war is money diverted from real social needs, like quality schools.

Her anti-war stance is another reason to vote "YES!" for Ruth.