Today’s ruling by the Supreme Court that left standing the basic provisions of the Obama Administration’s health care overhaul also put the spotlight on Gov. John Kitzhaber and Oregon's own health care reform efforts.
High gas prices have been in the news constantly this spring. For weeks, as Oregon has experienced soaring gas prices, the blogosphere has been awash in claims that refineries are fixing prices. Turns out, the paranoid among us could be right.
For the second year in a row, Oregon Business magazine has been named the best publication in its category by the Society of Professional Journalists of Oregon and SW Washington.
For the first time, there are substantial facts and numbers about the state's nonprofit sector, which employs 166,130 people, or 13% of Oregon’s private sector employment.
The number crunchers in the research division at the state’s employment department have come up with a very interesting snapshot of the growing Hispanic population in the Salem metro area, and its economic impact. Read more by Editor Robin Doussard.
Earlier this month I wrote a 4,000-word story on the shaky future of large destination resorts in Oregon. Here’s the abridged version: The housing collapse, over-saturation and public outcry has stalled any new big resorts, those given an exemption to build outside urban growth boundaries in hopes of spurring tourism for rural economies.
Tiny, beautiful Baker City has, like most rural Oregon towns, long struggled to create new business and jobs out of the ashes of its natural resources industry. The seat of a remote county with a population of only 16,000, Baker suffers from high unemployment but it does not suffer from a lack of trying.
It’s unusual for Oregon’s rural communities to get the spotlight. With most of the population of the state living in the Portland Metro area, rural towns are out of sight and generally out of mind. Rural leaders for years have told me that they figure they are pretty much on their own to reinvent their depressed economies, and unfortunately I have to agree with them.
This year’s Pulitzer Prizes were distinguished by a new-generation nonprofit newsroom sharing a prize with an old-generation newspaper newsroom. And while the prize duly rewards remarkable work and shows that a new content model clearly produces outstanding journalism, it doesn’t prove a financial solution for the distressed industry.
This week, ProPublica shared the Pulitzer for investigative work with The New York Times for the astounding story that a ProPublica reporter did about a New Orleans hospital after Hurricane Katrina, which ran in The New York Times Magazine. ProPublica has been up and running for only a little more than two years. Based in Manhattan, it is focused on investigations in the public interest and is primarily funded by Bay Area billionaires Herbert and Marion Sandler, whose Sandler Foundation gave $10 million to start the nonprofit. ProPublica’s stories are offered free to traditional news organizations and also published on its website.
Paul Steiger, ProPublica’s editor-in-chief, told Joe Strupp of Media Matters after the prizes were announced Monday that winning the Pulitzer “suggests that our nonpartisan, nonprofit model can serve a role in this time of expanding change in the media.”