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As an arts editor for the Eugene Weekly and an adjunct instructor at the U of Oregon's J-school, I'm fairly well-occupied by this topic a lot of the time. Things I've been thinking about lately:

• Glasstire, an online Texas arts magazine which just won the National Arts Journalism Summit's first project competition. Could Oregon sustain something like this? (Even though I love Portland and adore the arts communities there, I'd want it to be TRULY statewide.)

• Models like the Bay Area's Spot.Us, which takes pitches from journalists and others, crowdsources the funding and works with everything from local weeklies to, yes, the New York Times to get these stories out. 

• Portland's Neighborhood Notes, which my Reporting 1 students have looked at and, even before we knew about it, were emulating to a certain extent on our class blog. On the blog, they must post both traditional stories like profiles and more opinion or experience-based pieces on the Eugene neighborhoods they picked. The culminating project concerns health, health care or any health-related topic within these neighborhoods (drug use, sports fields and the emotional health of immigrant families that are broken up by the recession are three of the topics). Of course, we're not trying to make money at this ... yet. I'd be pumped to see an entrepreneurial course for journalism students! They're creative, and they're Steve Smith's wished-for age of 20, so I definitely see a bright future for them — and I hope they're getting the tools from all of their classes that make them flexible and ready to adapt to delivering content in a variety of forms.

Thanks for the ongoing discussion, Emily, Dave, Sarah, Julie et al. I look forward to hearing more about keeping energy and optimism going at a time when daily newspapers seem to be struggling. 

posted 3 years, 6 months ago
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Just wanted to give the Twitter names (and links) of the people on TOL today.

Think Out Loud itself is at ThinkOutLoudOPB

Kelli Matthews is kmatthews

Ted Wheeler is TedWheeler

Portland Water Bureau (Jennie Day-Burget) is PortlandWater

(I'm looking for Karen Pugsley's or the Green School's Twitter feed — not finding yet. Anyone?)

The Eugene Public Library is at EugenePublicLib

Ta,

Suzi Steffen (SuziSteffen)

posted 3 years, 7 months ago
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I read STUBBORN TWIG when I first started thinking about coming to the UO for Lauren Kessler's Literary Nonfiction program (which I did, graduated from it in 2004). At the time, I was teaching freshman rhetoric and research at the University of Iowa, and I used STUBBORN TWIG with several classes over the course of two or three years to talk about historical research and constructing compelling narratives.

My students, most of them from Iowa and Illinois, wrote reading journals each week, and they often mentioned reading FAREWELL TO MANZANAR in junior high. Some of them resisted the idea of reading STUBBORN TWIG -- oh, we already KNOW about internment camps, they would say -- but they all got drawn into the narrative quickly, and it was amazing to watch them get emotionally involved in the story of the Yasuis. By the end of the book, many of them would tell me, they were in tears.

A couple of the things that struck me as I read STUBBORN TWIG for the first time: the Yasuis, like so many others immigrants, worked hard to establish themselves as Americans and participated in civic life to a degree that would almost never be required of white residents of the town; and when internment came, the property of the Yasuis and so many other Japanese Americans was, for the most part, stolen from them. Just ... taken. That still seems quite, quite shocking.

I appreciate the huge amount of research that went into this book, and I'm so glad that Lauren was also able to create a compelling narrative from the very beginning of STUBBORN TWIG. I was glad to hear that the librarians chose it, along with Virginia Euwer Wolff's superb BAT 6, for the entire state to read. I hope everyone's reading them!

posted 4 years, 1 month ago
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