Every now and then, I think about switching careers to real estate, taxidermy, or delousing. For different reasons I think I'd be talented in each of the three professions, but an especially good delouser, because I'm good with people, and you need tenacity. It's rewarding work.

I tend only to reflect on such things when I'm really depressed. So when I tell you that by noon on Saturday, I was contemplating the finer points of my delousing business plan, you'll get a sense of how I was feeling. Would I use organic, sustainable chemicals for the job, I wondered? Or would I go with the old fashioned delousing juice, and push the business as "effective, first time." Would I stick to animals, or do people, too? And would the cost of insurance justify the risk? Davis's Delousing. It's got a ring to it, I thought...

Seeing the ads for the 2009 "Building A Better Journalist" conference online, I applied for a travel scholarship to the event at the University of Oregon in Eugene, and was given $100 by the Society of Professional Journalists, which organized the conference. I'm a terrible journalist, I reasoned, so the scholarship would go to good use, building a better one, and the local SPJ president graciously agreed. The scholarship allowed me to rent a Ford Fusion and whip that be-atch down the I-5 in time for the opening remarks at 9am, although I realized almost straight away that no amount of Fusion-whipping was going to make up for my lack of a Prozac prescription, this weekend.

"So many of my friends have lost their jobs in the last year," said Hagit Limor, a TV reporter from Cincinnati, and the SPJ's national president elect. "We've become irrelevant." "I'm the last investigative reporter left in Cincinnati," she continued. "There used to be seven."

Limor was addressing her remarks to roughly 100 people—many of them journalism students, and a few folks, like me, actually employed in the profession. Yet it wasn't her standard fare realism about the state of the industry that depressed me, it was her refusal to simply recite the writing on the wall.

"The station I work at changed all our job titles in the last year," she said. "We're all multimedia journalists, now." "When change happens, you can get depressed," she continued. "But to me, this is the most exciting time to be a journalist." Huh? "The point is, you got into this business because you like change. You wanted stress. That's what deadlines are about," she said. "We have nothing to lose," she continued, growing more shrill as the moments passed. "This is a wonderful time to be a journalist," she concluded. "I know that sounds crazy, but I'm excited," she said. Repeating: "I'm excited."

Yeah, right. What happened to journalistic objectivity? It reminded me, dead-pan, of Annette Bening's character in American Beauty, saying "I will sell this house today." The cornered, harried optimist. Read the rest after the jump.

Proving yet again that its lack of engagement in the race for house district 43 borders on is irresponsible, the Oregonian's website has named "Eddie Lewis" as the third contender in the race won earlier by Lew Frederick. The O's brief article on Frederick's selection has been updated and corrected, now, to name "Eddie Lincoln," without any mention of the earlier error, but Google, and Twitterer @TaBarnhart catch them out:

O, MY: WEBSITE CAN'T EVEN NAME THE CANDIDATE CORRECTLY

As you know, I'm a terrible journalist with a lousy record on accuracy. So I'm hardly in a position to throw stones. But the O's latest error compounds earlier problems with its reporting on this race, when they endorsed one candidate without even calling the others to find out what their policy positions might be. I really am appalled by the lack of focus on important local coverage in this instance. Especially given the O's stated goals in a recent internal memo:

"Reveal how power is used, decisions are made and the impact on citizens."; "Question and explore relevant issues in depth, and explain their substance and context." "Serve as the center and catalyst for community conversations."

Thoughts that occur to me, in response: How did today's coverage do any of that? Why is anybody going to think you're serious about these things, when you don't show it?

Yesterday I blogged about Friday's protest by Tea Party protesters, saying they were sick of being ignored by the mainstream media. The article was accompanied by this photo:

Today we got this email:

Date: October 20, 2009 7:44:52 AM PDT
To: news@portlandmercury.com
Subject: Request for Matt Davis

Hi, Matt. I attended the rally Friday (Operation: Can You Hear Us Now?), and appear in the top photo of the online article. Would it be possible for you to change the photo to one that does not include me? At least so prominently? Thank you.

Is it just me who's noticing the irony, here?

42 members of the Oregon Tea Party Coalition organized a protest Friday night, against being ignored by the mainstream media:

CAN YOU HEAR US NOW? OUTSIDE THE OREGONIAN BUILDING, FRIDAY NIGHT

The Mercury went along and documented all of it. Starting with the guy at the back, doing the rock hands, who has an INCREDIBLE business card:

REYNOLDS: IS GOING TO SMOKE THAT CIGAR LIKE BIG GOVERNMENT, RIGHT DOWN TO THE STUMP

First, let me say: I love conservative Oregonians. Ever since I went to the Americans For Prosperity pep rally in early June, I've been entranced by them. For one thing, nobody is ever "working on a screenplay" at one of these events. And there's generally a lot more attention paid to personal hygiene than you might find at, say, the food carts on SE 12th and Hawthorne on an average Friday night.

While I may not agree wholeheartedly with their politics—I like paying taxes for things like roads, schools, and health care, for starters—I think Oregon politics is often deathly boring. And these guys certainly liven things up. Read more about the protest after the jump.

Ah, liberal arts colleges. So the authors of a Reed "humor" publication called the Pamphlette recently published an article accusing Lewis and Clark staff of "rounding up and gassing all the Jews on their Portland, OR, campus," reports Inside Higher Ed. Cue the most absurd round of hand-wringing about whether or not the Pamphlette should be censored, and whether it matters that Lewis and Clark recently had to deal with swastikas in the bathrooms. There was even a huge discussion session of the incident, reportedly.

One editor, answering for the group, said that the intent of the article was to satirize a column in Reed's student newspaper that "argued that satirical Holocaust denial enables real genocide. We found this claim ridiculous, and that the goal of our article was to satirize this notion by driving it to its logical extreme."

Meh. I'll buy that. But I'm not sure I buy the editor's repeated argument that the publication was "never supposed to leave the campus." If that's the case, then one might question its point. Ah. I see...

Perhaps the saddest quote in the whole article is the conclusion, expecting a "higher standard of intellectualism" from Reed. I totally understand the need to express outrage, but really? If anything, this story will probably help with fund raising from ex-Reedies who celebrate the college as a place to push boundaries, albeit in this case, in a rather unimaginative and self-satisfied way.

The Oregonian is reporting Merritt Paulson told a town hall meeting in Beaverton Tuesday night that he won't follow through on a Major League Soccer deal here in Portland if he can't secure a baseball deal over there. This is the same line Paulson gave at one point in Lents, before the SE Portland neighbors shouted him down.

You wouldn't think it would be so difficult for Paulson to push the Beaverton deal through. After all, Beaverton recently hired Paulson's own former consultant, Don Mazziotti, to lead its "community development department."

Now the Beaverton Valley Times is reporting that Beaverton plans to tax residents $5 per property through 2036 to pay for the $59million sports stadium without a public vote. Paulson won't actually contribute a cent to the development, other than pre-paying $9million in license fees and a paltry six percent of ticket fees that he would have had to pay, regardless.

Best of all, Beaverton city council says it has done a "visioning project," consulting just 4000 residents, who have "showed overwhelming interest in attending local events, such as concerts, sporting events or baseball games."

I'd rather watch the cub scouts do Tosca, personally. My point: Isn't that justificatory sentence a little broad?

We have a call in to City Commissioner Randy Leonard, who led the MLS deal with Paulson here, to get his reaction to Paulson's remarks.

Fantastic story by KATU. Read it all at Oregon Media Central, including this:

Fournier had previously been excluded from Laurelhurst Park for using a stun gun on a minor, according to police records obtained by KATU. Bullock admitted at the time that "there was a question as to whether I had exceeded my authority."

Much?

It's worth hanging on for John Oliver's go-down-in-history remark at the end of the Daily Show's evisceration of CNN.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
CNN Leaves It There
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Ron Paul Interview

An internal memo at the Oregonian laying out plans for the paper's future has found its way to Oregon Media Central this morning. Following the paper's second buyout offer last month:

"We will not abandon our foundation of beat reporting," the memo says, "but beats will be redefined along areas of expertise of most interest to our readers. Some beats will be eliminated because with fewer people we cannot cover everything that we have in the past."

Here's the real juice:

Our focus in print:

* Reveal how power is used, decisions are made and the impact on citizens.
* Explain how all manner of things really work.
* Question and explore relevant issues in depth, and explain their substance and context.
* Introduce people to others worth knowing and to new ideas and innovations.
* Tell compelling stories of community.

Our focus online:

* Break news.
* Encourage, engage and collaborate with communities of interest (both geographic and subject).
* Serve as the center and catalyst for community conversations (both geographic and subject)
* Aggregate information in broad swaths across topics and provide information on topics of greatest interest/utility
* Tell stories with tools unavailable for print.

I love the line, "explain how all manner of things really work."