• LICE: Nice work if you can get 'em

• ALLEN HALL, U of O J.School

"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.

There aren't a lot of details as of now, but it sounds like KUFO's getting a pretty major overhaul—and losing some of Portland's most talented radio personalities in the process. (The fate of another popular KUFO show, The Rick Emerson Show, is still unknown; we'll update if and when we hear anything else.)

Cort and Fatboy have been friends of the Mercury for a while now—Steve's been a regular guest on their show to talk about TV, and they were kind enough to have me on once to blather about a comic book, and the Mercury geek contingent took up a regular row at their Battlestar Galactica screenings a while back. I guess the news of their firings wasn't particularly surprising to Cort and Fatboy, but for us—and I'm guessing more than a few Portland listeners—learning that there isn't gonna be any more Cort and Fatboy is definitely a shock. Portland radio just got suckier.

UPDATE, 4:35 PM: As noted in Cort and Fatboy's final podcast, Chris Patyk—who was KUFO's program director—has also been fired. (The mysterious anonymous forces at Oregon Media Central claim that KUFO is bringing in a new program director, Dave "Ditch" Milan, out of San Diego.) Elsewhere in the rumor mill, word is that KUFO's bringing in some guy named Ricker from Seattle. Still no word on the fate of any other KUFO programs.

UPDATE, 5:15 PM: It's looking more and more like Rick Emerson's been shown the door, too. Meanwhile, listeners who try to listen to Cort and Fatboy's final podcast via the KUFO page get the following message: "Sorry, the audio you are looking for is not available". Huh. Too bad there's nowhere else people can hear it....

LISTEN:

Cort and Fatboy's final podcast - October 23, 2009

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."

I was wondering if you've seen the A&E news feature "Pot City, USA" narrated by Meredith Vieira. It focuses on Arcata, California, the sleepy NorCal town where upwards of 20% of all private residences have been converted into grow houses. It's filled with the requisite adoration of law enforcement, pot bust ride along, and interview with some crazy-looking medical marijuana user. Medical marijuana is presented as being exploited for non-medical purposes which, while true, was not followed up with any discussion of ending prohibition.

From the show summary...

A lot of people think that Humboldt County in northern California is an American paradise. Small towns in the county like Arcata look like they've been plucked right out of a Norman Rockwell painting. But the town has a dirty little secret—law enforcement officials say that over 1,000 homes there may be growing marijuana illegally. Capt. Mark Chapman and the Humboldt County Drug Task Force are determined to take back the town, house by house. Our cameras follow as they make busts and fly over forestlands searching for hidden marijuana groves.

Here's the dirtiest little secret: the only way to end illegal grow-ops is to allow legal ones. The producers of "Pot City, USA" should've interviewed someone willing to point out that out. Once again: no one would be growing marijuana illegally in unoccupied homes or public forests if it were legal to grow marijuana on farms. Part one of "Pot City, USA" after the jump...

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.

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:

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.

During an interview last night on CNN, the balloon boy's father asked the balloon boy why he didn't reveal himself when he heard people calling for him. The balloon boy replied by saying "it was for the show."

And during this morning's Today show, the balloon boy vomited on camera while his father swore to Meredith Viera that this is not a hoax.

Oh man. Move over Jon & Kate: The Heene family have instantly become my favorite TV characters.

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."

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.

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.

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."

In downtown Portland, OR, stands an imposing 15-story edifice that’s one of the most hated buildings in America. The façade is an off-putting hodgepodge of faux classical columns, strange and useless decorative elements, and penitentiary-like small windows, with a depressing color scheme of brown, pink, and white (throwing in some tacky blue glass for good measure). “It’s all gaudy imagery with no tie to the location,” says Jason Fifield, an associate at Ankrom Moisan Architects in Portland. The interior isn’t much better—it’s been described as dark and claustrophobic.

Designed by famed architect Michael Graves, the Portland Building is an icon (for better or worse—mainly worse) of postmodernism, which was a major design trend in the 1980s, when the structure went up, but has since fallen from favor. And that’s a primary reason there’s not much enthusiasm for anything erected in that decade.