Last month, Willamette Week ran a cover story on the working conditions of illegal immigrants employed at the Del Monte Fresh Produce food processing plant in North Portland. Last week, federal agents working for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raided the plant and arrested 167 undocumented workers. ICE's affadavit (pdf file) cites and quotes from the Week's story, but also notes that "there are no indications that there was an ICE leak" that tipped the paper off. In other words, the ICE raid was already in the works. In an update this week, reporter Beth Slovic writes that the response to the piece before and after the raid has been interesting. "Before the raid, readers who already sympathized with illegal immigrant workers largely praised the May 2 story for describing working conditions at the plant. Unsympathetic readers saw it as a weak-kneed defense of law breakers," she writes. "The raid flipped those responses, prompting some readers to fault the story for naming the plant and others to praise it for apparently aiding agents in their bust."
Last week, the Portland alt-weekly revealed that The Oregonian's Tom Hallman Jr. was parking for free in a spot owned by a felon he once profiled. This week, Willamette Week reports that Hallman has been suspended for two weeks without pay, must undergo ethics training, cannot represent the Oregonian in public forums, and has been demoted from his current enterprise beat to a still-to-be-determined assignment.
AAN members are well-represented in the 2006 awards given out by the Education Writers Association, with a near-sweep of "Feature, News Feature or Issue Package" for papers under 100,000 circulation. In that category, Todd Spivak of the Houston Press took home First Place for "Cut Short," while Special Citations were awarded to Willamette Week's Beth Slovic for "Illegal Scholar," the Houston Press' Margaret Downing for "Opt In, Opt Out," and New Times Broward-Palm Beach's Kelly Cramer for "FCAT Scratch Fever." Kristen Hinman of Riverfront Times received a First Place award in the "Investigative Reporting" category for her Vashon High School Series.
John Callahan was scheduled to sing the blues this weekend in Salem, Ore., performing songs from his new album, "Purple Winos in the Rain." Non-ambulatory since he was paralyzed in a car accident at the age of 21, Callahan's lyrics are as dark as his cartoons -- suicide is mentioned in nearly every song, reports the Statesman Journal's Michelle Theriault -- but "there are slivers of a humor as bracing as his cartoon work throughout the album," says Theriault.
Eyeballs popped at Portland's largest alt-weekly when the amount of money raised by its fundraising drive approached a quarter of a million dollars. This outpouring of beneficence was a product of the paper's "Give!Guide," which supports local non-profits by encouraging philanthropy among readers 35 and under. "We never expected anything like this," says Publisher Richard Meeker. "Obviously, this says a lot about our readers -- and Portland."
Willamette Week Editor Mark Zusman tells the American Journalism Review this month that his reporters are taken seriously by the people and institutions they cover because "we have for 30 years now been publishing stories that have resulted in people getting put behind bars, or getting laws changed, or good people getting recognized, or justice prevailing." Zusman's interview appears in "The Pulitzer Cartel," an article in the October/November issue of AJR in which the magazine's Donna Shaw explores why four newspapers -- The New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times and the Wall Street Journal -- "have dramatically increased their share of Pulitzer largesse over the years." Writes Shaw: "Some Pulitzer-watchers believe that favoritism and politics play a role in the dominance of the big papers." But Zusman, whose paper won a 2005 Pulitzer for investigative reporting, disagrees: "The New York Times does extraordinarily good journalism and that's why they win... That's why the Washington Post wins."
Karla Starr, who compiles the listings of book-related events for Willamette Week, got a bigger reaction than she expected to an item in the August 23 issue. Starr wrote:
Are you a fatty? Want to be in a book? Waddle over to a computer, grab your typing stick (those sausage fingers hit too many keys at once, don't they?), go to stacybias.net, and fill out the contact form for your chance to contribute to Bias' FatGirl Speaks, a short-fiction anthology inspired by her event of the same name.According to a note in the Aug. 30 issue, "WW's email inboxes, voicemail and front desk were inundated by responses." The Letters to the Editor section includes six messages from angry readers, one from Bias, and an apology from Starr. "After experiencing firsthand the power of reading so many stories, my appreciation and respect for Stacy Bias' work and upcoming book has grown tremendously," Starr says.
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