OPB’s hiring committee wanted someone to “help build a newsroom-how many opportunities in your career do you get to build something, especially when that career is journalism ?” Griffin says.
In 2015, Anna Griffin, now the station’s news director, was nearing the end of an 11-year tenure as a reporter and columnist for the Oregonian. Next, the news staff tried its hand at some in-depth reporting, including 2010’s Peabody-winning “ Hard Times,” which chronicled the recession through the eyes of Oregonians.īut one-off special projects don’t make a newsroom. That opened some space, along with well-timed grant funding, for the 2008 launch of Think Out Loud, the noontime interview show that serves as an Oregon-centric version of Fresh Air, with longtime host Dave Miller standing in for Terry Gross. The station scrapped its daily half-hour Oregon Considered show, which had walled off local reporting and required reporters to file incremental daily stories to fill the airtime, and began embedding its local reporting inside juggernauts Morning Edition and All Things Considered instead, simultaneously relieving some pressure on its reporters and giving their work greater prominence. “We started to shift the direction away from being a pipeline for NPR and PBS, a distribution platform for other people’s programming, and to being a local journalism organization,” he says. Well, you bring that up by a point or two, and the money starts to flow.įor Morgan Holm, OPB’s chief content officer, all the change and media market contraction opened a door for experimentation. They will tell you during their drives that some small percentage of listeners donate.
#OPB HOURLY NEWS SERIES#
Today, after a series of painful layoffs, there are about 65 reporters and editors, though the paper features notable investigative work and has led the pack locally in watchdog coronavirus coverage. At its height, the state’s largest newspaper, the Oregonian, employed about 400 journalists, including multiple reporters assigned to suburban bureaus and cor respondencies around the state, as far-flung as La Grande, Grants Pass, and at the Oregon Coast.
Oregon’s media landscape shifted accordingly, as locally owned newspapers were sold to private equity firms and giant media chains. Newspapers were battered by shrinking circulations as more people turned to digital news, as well as a loss of revenue from classified advertising that migrated to Craigslist and elsewhere online. Meanwhile, in the mid-2000s, social media, which steers so much traffic for news organizations today, was still in its infancy, and streaming/on-demand radio was more cumbersome to access than it is now. Faithful listeners could be spotted filling their OPB pledge drive–issued tote bags up with vegetables at local farmers markets, and drive-time commuters tuned in for the National Public Radio–provided programming. And that night, a galvanized Portland took to the streets in numbers not seen since the initial days of the racial justice protests that swept the city in early June, after the murder of George Floyd. Ice Cube was tweeting about the story, along with Maggie Haberman, the New York Times’ in-house Trump whisperer. Very much on purpose, Levinson’s story had gone live just as then-President Trump’s Acting Secretary of Homeland Security, Chad Wolf, arrived for a now-infamous press conference at downtown’s federal courthouse, at which he would refer to Portland as a “city under siege.” CNN had called. On the afternoon of July 16, 2020, just after co-filing a story for Oregon Public Broadcasting about federal law enforcement snatching black-clad protesters off the streets of Portland in the middle of the night and shoving them into unmarked vehicles, reporter Jonathan Levinson-the comparatively rare army vet who sports a nose ring-put away his phone and went to get a haircut.Įmerging freshly shorn, he fished out his phone, only to find it overheating with new mes sages and notifications.
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