I do like stirring the pot.

By the time I’d posted my story of butting heads with Brian “Mr. Eileen Brady” Rohter way back in the 90s, the Kindergartners over at Blue Oregon already had their panties in a knot about somebody else asking if entrepreneur and mayoral candidate Eileen Brady might be anti-union (a legit question, since she’s running to be the boss of many unionized workers).

(Aw, shit, I owe a serious apology to Kindergartners everywhere. Those Blue Oregon wankers wish they were half as mature and cool as Kindergartners.)

I posted a link to my Nature’s story to the comment thread at BO, which was met with more bashing of the guy who asked the first question, and hand wringing over what this had to do with anything, since it was 15 years ago (never mind the fact that Rohter and Brady are non-union employers in the heavily unionized grocery industry).

Anyway, stupid political hacks and wannabes being what they are, somebody jumped on their iPad late that night and searched Google using the phrase “refuting Steve Rawley nature’s union.”

This is funny on multiple levels:

• It shows how freaked out they are by this open secret.
• It’s a really poorly formulated search term; the top five results link to sites owned by me, the guy they want to refute.
• And they clicked through to my site. Four times.

I got a hint for Brady and her sycophants: you can’t refute it, because it happened. Also, you’re not very good at using Google.

Let’s review: Brian Rohter, Eileen Brady’s husband and business partner, aggressively opposed at least one union drive, using the standard union-busting tactics of intimidation and happy talk (“we’re different,” “it would destroy our culture,” “union bosses make much money,” “a big union would stand between little old us and our happy employee family,” “two bosses,” “good as we’ve been to you,” etc.).

At some point, maybe, somebody will ask Brady directly how she feels about collective bargaining in her stores. Then we’ll get to hear a lot of pablum about that speshul New Seasons culture, and how staff doesn’t even want a union.

If it’s a typical lazy Portland political reporter asking the question, they’ll just print the fluff unchallenged.

But if the question is asked in a union hall (mayoral candidates have been known to make the rounds), I can imagine a nice follow up: “If you’re not opposed to your staff being represented, would you allow reps access to employees on site, and would you recognize the union if a majority of staff were to sign authorization cards (i.e. ‘card check’)?” (Note that in 1997, Nature’s, with Brian Rohter as general manager, not only refused card check, they launched a specious challenge to their workers’ right to hold an election after a majority in one department had signed authorization cards.)

So obviously, this is a very delicate question for Brady, probably more so for her business operations than for her political aspirations (a mayoral candidate can certainly win without union support). Whatever her answer may be, just asking the question puts her in a difficult spot.

So… who’s gonna ask?

From today’s fish wrapper (Warning: Oregonian link, will likely be dead within two weeks):

He prayed. “Please, please, Lord, let this train stop in time.”

It’s hard to know if the plea helped.

News flash: After over a decade of rewriting school district press releases, The Oregonian’s main education reporter has written not one, but two news stories critical of Portland Public Schools. Since they even cite sources outside the district, one might go so far as to call the stories almost “investigative.”

Today’s front page story (Warning: Oregonian link; will be 404 two weeks after publication) details how the district is violating state election law by campaigning for its half-billion dollar bond measure on the public dime.

This article comes less than a week after another article (Warning: Oregonian link; will be 404 two weeks after publication) critical of the cost basis of the bond measure.

Nice to see some critical ed reporting in the usually complicit, complacent O. Too bad it only comes when the reporter’s property tax is in danger of going up. Think about it.

Geo. W. Bush and Henry Paulson

If you know me, or if you’ve read this blog from time to time, you’ve got some inkling what I think of Merritt Paulson, ultra-rich scion of former Goldman Sachs CEO and Bush Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson. (If you don’t know me, and don’t want to follow the links, here’s what I think: he’s a spoiled rich kid playing sports team owner and an annoying little twit.)

After a bizarre series of attempted deals with the Mayor of Portland, Sam Adams, and the shadow mayor, Portland Commissioner Randy Leonard — who tried like hell to figure out a way to build the Paulsons two stadiums on the public dime, but ran into tenatious opposition from veterans, architects, urban planners, neighborhood activists and historic preservationists — poor wittle Merrit only got one stadium and had to sell his wittle baseball team for lack of a suitable playground.

(His daddy is a partner in his minor league sports empire, by the way, so it’s a wonder he wouldn’t put up more cash to build a stadium if it’s such a sure fire financial win to invest in sports stadiums as is frequently claimed. But I digress….)

The excavators are already busy at PGE Park (nee Civic Stadium; the Paulsons get the dough on the naming deal), ripping out part of the $38.5 million renovations done in 2001. These renovations, that Portland is still paying off, were done to make it a better venue for baseball, including a retro, manually-operated scoreboard. It’s a long story. Cutting to the chase: they’re re-renovating nine years later as a soccer-specific venue, to the exclusion of baseball.

Today comes the news that the Portland Beavers have been sold as expected, and are officially moving to Escondido, California.

I generally avoid the crappy comments section at OregonLive, the crappy Web partner of our crappy daily The Oregonian, but today I couldn’t resist jumping in to the Soccer v. Baseball war when somebody posted an invitation to a “Timbers Army/Sam Adams joke contest.” Here’s my entry, edited here in a vain attempt to punch it up a little:

A mayor, a councilman and a billionaire walk into a bar. A couple sleepy customers are watching a baseball game on the screen behind the bar. Bartender says, what’ll it be, boys? Mayor says, whatever my friend here wants, it’s on the house. Bartender says, no way pal, hit the road.

Next thing you know, a bunch of drunken, middle-aged, white man-children wearing scarves are flooding through the front door, knocking over tables and singing vulgar songs…. pretty soon the sleepy baseball fans are out on their ears, there’s a soccer game on the TV, the billionaire’s behind the bar with his hands in the till and the bartender’s getting beat up by the councilman.

The mayor takes out his phone and tweets: “This is a great day for Portland. #timbersarmy #mls”

Yeah. It’s a joke, but it’s not very funny.

Do me better. What’s your Portland/Sam Adams/Merritt Paulson/Randy Leonard/Timbers Army/Beavers joke?

A couple years back, the Oregonian’s hackneyed Web front-end, OregonLive.com, started experimenting with a local implementation of Reddit, a link-sharing social network. It never gained critical mass, and it was easy to game the system to get (and keep) links on the front page of OregonLive.

Hey, we had our juvenile fun, but it was to a point: the Oregonian simply doesn’t have a clue how to operate in the 21st century new media world.

OregonLive made a number of tweaks to their Reddit system, including moving the links to the very bottom of the front page and giving up on hosting Oregon Reddit (it’s just a category at Reddit.com now). We can still have a little fun with them.

They (obviously) still don’t get new media at the Oregonian (they had a daily podcast for a couple months starting in August 2008, which petered out last March), but that’s just a critique of their delivery.

The real knock on the O is the same knock on pretty much any old school daily: their pretension of objectivity makes them shills for the status quo.

Journalist, author and pundit Dan Savage had some fun recently with what he calls a “drug war” story in the Oregonian, and gave Oregonian reporter Bryan Denson the honor of “Stupid Fucking Credulous Hack of the Day” not once, but twice in the same week.

I thought that story deserved a link on the front page of OregonLive, and voila!

Dan also published a long and humorous e-mail exchange with Denson, which is an object lesson in the insularity of reporters at the O. (Here’s Savage’s Wikipedia page, just for future reference, Bryan.)

…beat blogging!

Two and a half years ago, I started ranting on this site about the gross educational inequities in Portland’s public schools. This eventually got the attention of the local mainstream media and the greater school district community. I didn’t set out with a mission, other than just speaking my mind.

Pretty soon all I wrote about here was schools, schools, schools. One day, while writing yet another blog post about schools, my daughter asked me, “How come you only write about school politics on your hockey blog?” “Good question!” I said, and started another blog all about schools.

Why? Because I can (my day job is “professional nerd”).

Eventually, PPS Equity started taking on the look of a… what? Online magazine? I settled on calling it a “new media publication.” I even came up with a mission statement: “to inform, advocate and organize, with a goal of equal educational opportunity for all students in Portland Public Schools, regardless of their address, their parent’s wealth, or their race.” Readership climbed steadily, with around 20% of visits consistently coming directly from school district computers.

Since I host my blogs on a server that I own, I decided to open up my platform to others working for the common good.

That’s it, I thought, I’m doing “new media publishing!” It’s got a nice ring to it.

But I’m also doing some kind of journalism, and that’s where it gets tricky. I have a great deal of respect for professional journalists, and a healthy disdain of bloggers who pick up the latest news reports, toss off 500 words of commentary, and call themselves “citizen journalists” or some such. The point being that they are leeching off of the professionals. The story doesn’t run if somebody doesn’t report it in the first place. That’s what journalists — a.k.a. reporters — do.

When I wrote for Portland Metblogs (moribund since last February), I floated the idea of doing citizen journalism there, which didn’t go over well with a couple other contributors who couldn’t accept that writing from a point of view does not disqualify one as a journalist.

When I was invited to be on a panel about blogging at a conference for professional journalists and journalism students last fall, I had a little trepidation about being chewed up and spit out. (It was a very friendly crowd, as it turned out.) The two other bloggers on the panel were very clear about considering themselves journalists, but I made a point of identifying myself as a community activist, not a journalist.

But… the kind of writing — and reporting — that I do is outside of the usual realm activism. I actually do reporting, is the thing, at the same time I’m doing advocacy and organizing. “New media publishing” captures the big picture of what it means to run a community blog, but the actual beat reporting I do is, in fact, journalism.

Which all became clear to me the other day when BeatBlogging.org, a project affiliated with New York University’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, gave me a nice shout-out on their Leaderboard, which they describe as “a list of the most innovative beat reporters in the world.”

Wha….? You’ve got to be kidding me! (Seriously, I’m floored over here!)

Their summary of my work on PPS Equity highlights the combination of advocacy and journalism. “…[I]t is starting to seem like good beatbloggers — especially education ones — mix in a bit of advocacy with their journalism. It’s not that they are biased, but rather that they care to see change,” writes Patrick Thornton, editor of BeatBlogging.org.

I poked around their site… man, great stuff. It’s all about “how journalists can use social networks, blogs and other Web tools to improve beat reporting.” I’ve only scratched the surface, but I’ve already found great information that I’ll be trying to incorporate into my work at PPS Equity going forward, like how in the hell to use Twitter effectively. (Sadly, I also found out that BeatBlogging.org is losing its funding. Damn, talk about bad timing!)

Most of all, I’m glad to have a name for what it is that I’ve been doing: beat blogging. It’s not at all what I set out to do, but here I am doing it. One of these days, I’ll have to figure out how to monetize it so I can quit my day job.

First off, I friggin’ love Portland, so don’t give me that hater bullshit.

Now that I’ve got that out of the way, let’s cut to the chase: Portland is over-the-top passive aggressive.

It manifests in traffic, politics and inter-personal relationships. At the grocery store. At work. In lines. At concerts, sporting events, and the library.

Passive-aggressiveness rules so much, there is a taboo on directness. One cannot say “It creeps me out that the mayor was sucking face with a 17-year-old in a City Hall men’s room” without being labeled a prude. (In the words of Bob Dylan, “They smile to your face, but behind your back they hiss….”)

The People’s Republic of Portland (that’s not a put-down; that part I like) is a one-party state, as Willamette Week‘s Nigel Jaquiss said in his close-up on Newsweek’s Web site this week. “[P]ortland is a … go-along, get-along town where people don’t question the orthodoxy. They’re very comfortable having a real absence of critical debate of most issues.”

Nigel was talking (politely) about the reporters and editors at The Oregonian, which has thrice been scooped (twice by the Willamette Week) on stories about Oregon politicians with (ahem) self-control issues surrounding where they put their penises. (Oh, I’m sorry honey, am I being a prude again?)

That lack of critical coverage of our politics and government means that those with land and money can pretty much do what they want with our city, as long as they call it green.

Commercial real estate developers, the power behind the throne in Portland, have successfully co-opted environmentally-minded liberals in Portland and operate with impunity under the cover of many layers of indignity generated by their unwitting minions.

Example: you cannot be opposed to a streetcar project without being a tool of big oil (yeah, that’s me!), even if a primary goal of said streetcar project is to move not people but real estate.

If somebody says it’s “sustainable,” you damn well better not speak out against it, even if that sustainable condo block is driving gentrification and pushing black and brown folks further to the margins of our city and society.

We’ve got a real race problem in Portland, but you better not talk about it. It makes white liberals very uncomfortable to be confronted with their racism. Our neighborhoods are pretty segregated, but our schools are worse, like the Jim Crow south: separate and way unequal.

Are you a white person with some kind of “bikability” issue? The city’s got you covered! You got a problem with finding a place you can afford to live off your service-sector wages? Sorry, pal, Portland can’t help you unless you work “sustainable” into your pitch. Mental health problems? Hit the road, Jack.

Perhaps my biggest gripe is the disconnect between Portland!! and Portland; that is, between the hip and trendy little Pacific Northwest city as seen in the New York Times (Powell’s! Foodies! Coffee! Sustainable! Green! Did I mention Sustainable?) and the sometimes rough-around-the edges part of Portland I live in.

Next installment: Portland’s extended adolescence.

Here’s the lunch panel from the Society of Professional Journalists‘ “Building a Better Journalist” conference last month in Eugene (I wrote a little preview here). This panel, moderated by Rob Smith, editor of the Portland Business Journal, featured Steve Engelberger, managing editor of ProPublica, Steve Smith, former editor of the Spokane Spokesman-Review and Frank Mungeam, online editor at KGW, Portland’s NBC affiliate.

These guys have some distinctly different ideas on the future of the newsroom, and, more importantly, how it will be funded.

The future of news from SPJ Oregon/SW Washington on Vimeo.

Anybody who knows a professional print journalist — and I know a few — knows that there is a growing sense of panic in the industry. Readership is in a death spiral, along with ad revenue. Owners of big city dailies — mostly large conglomerates now — are reacting by slashing newsroom staff. Our own local daily, The Oregonian, announced buyouts this summer for at least 100 full-time employees (a story I broke here, later picked up by Willamette Week and Oregon Media Insiders, and much later reported in The O itself).

In the throes of this existential crisis, it’s easy for journalists to blame the Internet. That’s where all the classified ads went (Craig’s List), and it’s also where readers, especially young readers, go for 24×7, up-to-the-minute news coverage and analysis. Who wants a pile of dead-tree paper on their porch with yesterday’s news?

Big city dailies like The O have been slow to adapt to the new media landscape (you may notice that I’m not linking to any Oregonian stories here, for the simple reason that they don’t provide online access to their archive), but even those papers with great Web sites are struggling. That’s because there is a revolutionary change afoot, well beyond the shift of medium from print to electronic.

This shift is every bit as important as the introduction of movable type was, and in much the same way. The difference is in scale.

Now, almost anybody in an industrialized nation can own or borrow a digital printing press. The implications for democracy are stunning, as evidenced by the sudden and lasting impact of Web-based organizations like MoveOn.org and the online fund raising and network-building efforts of insurgent Democratic candidate Howard Dean in 2004.

In the realm of information dissemination, bloggers have created an echo chamber for issues of concern to them and their candidates, keeping stories alive that would otherwise die in a 24-hour news cycle. But until recently, they mostly acted like aggregators, not reporters, simply repeating and amplifying news gleaned from traditional sources.

But the trend now is toward doing actual journalism, albeit with a well-defined point of view.

People who have faith in objectivity in journalism take umbrage at this, but objectivity is an artificial construct. Every story you read in every newspaper has a point of view, whether or not it is obvious. (Eric Alterman covered this issue in more depth in the New Yorker last March.)

Mainstream news gathering organizations have built-in biases, largely a result of their advertisers and their proximity to the powerful; their pretension to the contrary just makes things worse. Prime examples from Oregon’s biggest daily include sitting on the Bob Packwood and Neil Goldschmidt stories, certainly two of the biggest stories of modern Oregon political history.

Especially regarding issues of social justice, pretending to give “balanced” coverage is absurd. There is no point in giving equal time to proponents of injustice.

Which is why I find the emergence of ProPublica refreshing.

ProPublica is an independent, non-profit newsroom that will produce investigative journalism in the public interest. Our work will focus exclusively on truly important stories, stories with “moral force.” We will do this by producing journalism that shines a light on exploitation of the weak by the strong and on the failures of those with power to vindicate the trust placed in them.

ProPublica is setting a standard higher than current mainstream dailies, something it can afford to do with its private, independent funding. With its emergence, the death of traditional dailies is easier to take. After all, classified ads, obituaries, comics and lifestyle sections don’t do much to advance democracy.

Investigative journalism in the public interest does advance democracy, and it’s something the dailies long ago cut way back on.

But most blogging doesn’t rise to the level of ProPublica. Instead, at its best, the blogosphere offers the opportunity for citizen journalists to report on narrowly defined vertical topics — like a local school district, for example. While most bloggers in this realm, myself included, don’t do it full time and thus can’t do the in-depth reporting, they can offer a constant attention to issues that keep professional journalists focused.

As a citizen journalist in Portland, I’ve had productive relationships with professional journalists at the Portland Tribune and Willamette Week on issues concerning Portland Public Schools. We frequently feed off of each others’ stories, and together produce a body of work that has a clear point of view on one hand, and also a firm basis in factual reporting.

My relationship with reporters at The Oregonian, though, has been much more arm’s length. Their extreme caution in covering public schools belies a clear bias against challenging the status quo. So in their attempt to show no bias (i.e. by refusing to do significant investigation into actual, ongoing, documented injustice), they show a significant bias.

They also assure the continued demise of their newspaper.

At the end of the day, the new media landscape means that “what is news” is no longer determined by middle-aged, middle class white guys behind closed doors in a downtown office building. They’re no longer the only ones buying ink by the barrel, and they can no longer suppress news that goes against the interest of their friends and advertisers.

Now that digital ink is virtually free, Democracy is better served. Women in particular, who for ages have been treated like second-class citizens by the dailies (look at the resources poured into sports coverage), have flourished in the blogosphere. There’s something out there for everybody, which only makes the anemic efforts of the dead tree newspaper to appeal to women less relevant.

The big city daily represents an outmoded mindset, delivered in an environmentally destructive form. As long as organizations like ProPublica are around, along with the traditional journals of opinion like The Nation, alternative papers like Willamette Week, and a healthy blogosphere, I’m cautiously optimistic that the death of the big city daily is not necessarily a bad thing.

The professional journalist will not only survive, but become stronger and more respected, happily co-existing in a symbiotic relationship with the citizen journalist.

Note: The Society of Professional Journalists of Oregon and Southwest Washington is hosting Building a Better Journalist 2008 this weekend at the University of Oregon’s School of Journalism and Communication in Eugene, with an emphasis on the Internet. ProPublica managing editor Steve Engelberg is the featured speaker. I am also on the program (to the shock and surprise of some journalist friends), taking part in a panel discussion on blogging, along with Bike Portland‘s Jonathan Maus and Loaded Orygun‘s Mark Bunster, moderated by Willamette Week news editor Hank Stern.

Sources have revealed that the Oregonian is preparing for a major round of cost-cutting, which will include closing all but two bureaus (south and west). Buyout offers are expected in the fall, with the goal of a cutting 50 positions company-wide, including 30 in the newsroom.

As the paper struggles with declining readership and ad revenue along with the rest of the daily print journalism industry, it is amazing that they still refuse to enter the digital media market in a serious way, as every other mainstream media outlet in Portland has. Blame it on their parent company, Newhouse, which has kept all of its papers at arms length from their family of sister companies (like OregonLive) that operate on the Web and publish selected content from the papers.

This kind of stodgy, tentative relationship to the changing media landscape is quickly making the O a living dinosaur.