Rachel Andersen is an account executive at Anvil Media. She holds a bachelor’s degree in business from Oregon State University and has been in the search engine marketing industry for nearly three years. She has expertise in all aspects of search engine marketing, including organic and paid search as well as reputation management and online public relations. She specializes in SEO for large sites. More specifically, Andersen has devoted the majority of her time to online publications such as IDG where SEO efforts must be scalable in order to see positive movement. Andersen has been responsible for the development and execution of SEO training summits with top IDG editors and bloggers as well as ongoing tracking and consulting for Computerworld, CIO, PC World and InfoWorld. She hails from Fairbanks, Alaska and enjoys traveling, reading and spending time with her dog.
Torrid Joe is the blogging name of Mark Bunster, who resides in Lake Grove. He is the founder of Loaded Orygun, a web community dedicated to Oregon politics and culture, modeled after the structure of popular liberal activist site Daily Kos. Loaded Orygun received a grant from the BlogPAC organization in 2007, as a way to bring state-level community blogging to Oregon under the general Kos model. The blog was founded in January 2006 and has operated with content on a 6-7 day basis since then, often contributing original news through interviews, research and tips, as well as stories that slip through the cracks of the traditional media. As someone excoriated by the football team in high school for writing as sports editor in the school’s paper that the coach was underperforming, he knows well the threat of contempt.
Katie Campbell is the multimedia editor for the journal of literary nonfiction Etude (etude.uoregon.edu). She’s also a writer, photographer and multimedia journalist. She has been a backpack journalist since the early 2000s, working in the United Kingdom, Europe and Central America. She worked as an enterprise reporter for newspapers in Minnesota and Florida, before coming to the University of Oregon to study literary nonfiction and documentary film. Her blog, Telling Stories (campbell-katie.blogspot.com), contains her musings about literary nonfiction, multimedia and the writerly life. One of her pieces of narrative nonfiction was selected for inclusion in the Norton anthology The Best Creative Nonfiction vol. 2 (July 2008).
Zach Dundas is a former staff reporter and editor for Willamette Week who made the freelance leap in 2005. So far, he has cobbled together a semi-viable existence by writing for national and local magazines and newspapers, working on a book, pretending he knows something about “multimedia content” and making occasional forays into the PR-ish dark side. Not exactly the stuff decadent hip-hop videos are made of, but on the other hand, if he can do it, so can you.
Steve Engelberg is the managing editor of ProPublica, a new nonprofit devoted to journalism in the public interest. Before that, he was managing editor of The Oregonian, and before that he worked for The New York Times for 18 years, starting their investigative unit in 2000. Engelberg has shared in two George Polk Awards for reporting and was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize. He supervised two Pulitzer prize winning investigations at the Times. While he was at The Oregonian the paper won the Pulitzer for breaking news and was finalist for its investigative work on methamphetamines and charities intended to help the disabledHe is the co-author of Germs: Biological Weapons and America’s Secret War (2001).
Richard Hagar is an expert appraiser and real estate agent based in Mercer Island, Wash. He has trained law enforcement investigators in 20 states on how to track and document real estate fraud, and has been a source on the subject for MSNBC, CNN and NPR. He sounded the alarm on Washington Mutual long before the savings and loan was seized by the FDIC.
Don Hamilton is communications director for the Oregon Secretary of State, a post he assumed this year after three decades as a reporter. In his newspaper career, Hamilton covered politics for The Oregonian and thePortland Tribune and twice won the regional SPJ award for best government reporting. His assignments included the Oregon Legislature, the Washington Legislature, Portland City Hall and two years in The Oregonian’s Washington, D.C. bureau. Hamilton has filed stories from South America, Asia, Europe, Cuba and Antarctica. He’s been a contributing commentator for NPR’s Morning Edition, a police reporter for the City News Bureau of Chicago and once won a lifestyles writing award for a story about baseball gloves. Before his newspaper career, he worked as a bellman and as a disco DJ under a pseudonym he won’t reveal.
Frank Mungeam is the nternet site manager for kgw.com, named Best TV Web Site in Oregon by the Associated Press six of the past seven years. Mungeam has a psychology degree from Harvard, is a published author, and has more than 20 years experience in broadcasting. He has managed Kgw.com since 2006. Prior to that, he was director of new media for katu.com (ABC) in Portland.
Steve Novick is a senior project manager with Pyramid Communications. Steve grew up in Cottage Grove, Oregon, and received his undergraduate degree from the University of Oregon and his law degree from Harvard. He spent nine years in the Environment Division of the U.S. Justice Department, bringing civil enforcement cases under the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act and Superfund toxic waste law. As lead counsel in the Love Canal toxic waste case, Steve helped to recover $129 million in cleanup costs for the taxpayers. Since returning to Oregon, Novick has worked on public policy issues from a variety of vantage points, many of which involved contact with the news media. Steve served as Chief of Staff to the Democrats in the State Senate; as communications director for Citizens for Oregon’s Future, a non-profit dedicated to dispensing unbiased information on tax and budget issues; and as director of the Center for Constructive Citizen Action, which fought ballot initiatives that threatened funding for public services. In 2008, Steve ran for the Democratic nomination for the United States Senate, losing the primary by three percentage points. Steve was proud to receive quite favorable treatment from both the mainstream media and all the best bloggers.
Steve Rawley is publisher and editor of PPS Equity <http://ppsequity.org/>, a community blog advocating equal opportunity for all students in Portland Public Schools. He first began blogging in 2004, and in 2006 started his current personal blog, More Hockey Less War <http://morehockeylesswar.org/>, where he writes about Portland politics, hockey, and life. A software engineer by trade, he hosts his blogs (as
well as his wife Nancy’s blog, Wacky Mommy <http://wackymommy.org/>) with 100% free, open source software on a Web server he built from parts.
Lance Robertson is a recovering newspaper-holic who is the communications coordinator for the Eugene Water & Electric Board, Oregon’s largest citizen-owned utility, and is an adjunct instructor at the University of Oregon School of Journalism and Communication. A native Oregonian, Lance spent 25 years as a reporter and editor, mostly covering the old growth forest controversy and other environmental issues for The Register-Guard from 1989 to 2001. He also covered a number of political campaigns, including the 1996 U.S. Senate race won by Ron Wyden. He lives in Eugene with his freelance-writer spouse, Sarah Robertson, and their two teenage children.
Nancy Rommelmann’s articles and profiles have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, the Los Angeles Times, the LA Weekly, Willamette Week, Portland Monthly and other publications. Her work often explores the story behind the story – LAPD officers and the refuge that is the cop bar; a young movie star seeking emancipation from her mother; the inhabitants of a Skid Row dive; the disciples of a Vietnamese spiritual leader; the workaday lives of a Mexican gardening in the Hollywood Hills, and a cross-country trip to interview serial killer John Wayne Gacy two weeks before his execution. Recently, Rommelmann has chronicled people whose outsize dreams and delusions inspire them to audacious and sometimes terrible acts: a mother with Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy who murdered her fourteen-year-old daughter before herself committing suicide; the writer Laura Albert, who perpetrated a ten-year con by writing as a teenage boy, the demimonde darling JT LeRoy, and a quintet of Ponzi schemers who, despite together not having the business acumen of a cat, were able in less than two years to scam from people more than two hundred million dollars. Rommelmann’s work has received many awards, most notably “Jena at 15,” which received the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies (AAN) award for Best Feature, as well as awards from the Los Angeles Press Club and PenWest. Rommelmann has published three books, and is currently at work on Leaving Los Angeles, a memoir about fame and its discontents.
John Russial is an associate professor in the University of Oregon’s School of Journalism and Communication. He won the school’s Marshall Award for Innovative Teaching in 1999 and he was named outstanding educator for 2003 by the newspaper division of AEJMC. His 17-year newspaper career includes 12 years at the Philadelphia Inquirer, where he was Sunday copy chief.
Julie Sabatier is the creator and host of the radio show/podcast Destination DIY (http://destinationdiy.org). She is also the podcast producer for Bitch Magazine and the associate producer of Oregon Public Broadcasting’s daily talk show Think Out Loud. Julie has produced radio stories in short and long form for Pacifica, American Public Media and other outlets.
Carla Savalli is the former assistant managing editor for local news at The Spokesman-Review, an award-winning daily newspaper in Spokane, Wash. Until her recent resignation, Savalli worked for her hometown paper 16 years. She began her career almost 25 years ago, covering schools for zoned editions at The Tacoma News Tribune in Tacoma, Wash. She also worked as an editor in Moscow, Idaho, and Las Vegas. Savalli continues to speak nationally about her “Newsroom of the Future” report, which was the result of a three-month project for The Spokesman-Review. The goal was to survey the best practices of newsrooms around the country and return to Spokane with proposals for how the paper might adapt its work flow and culture in order to remain relevant in the new Information Age.
Rob Smith is the editor of the Portland Business Journal. Born and bred in Portland, he graduated from the University of Oregon in 1985. His first job out of college was working for Neil Goldschmidt. Disenchanted with politics, he moved to Seattle and began a journalism career by freelancing high school sporting events for a suburban newspaper. The editors liked what his work and offered him a news writing position a few months later. He’s since worked for numerous publications. He joined the Puget Sound Business Journal — a sister publication to the Portland Business Journal — in 1998 as special reports editor. He was managing editor there when he was chosen to become editor of the Portland Business Journal in November 2003.
Steven A. Smith is the former editor of The Spokesman-Review, a privately held newspaper in Spokane, Wash., with a daily circulation of 100,000 and a Sunday circulation of 125,000. As editor, Smith supervised all news and editorial operations and a staff of 134 that produced three daily editions. He was named editor in July 2002. Prior to joining The Spokesman-Review, Smith was editor for two years of the Statesman Journal, a Gannett newspaper in Salem, Ore. Previously, he was editor and vice president of The Gazette, a Freedom Communications, Inc. newspaper in Colorado Springs, Co. He was named editor in October 1995 and vice president in 1997. Before joining The Gazette, Smith served two years as assistant to the vice presidents for news for Knight-Ridder in Miami. He worked with Knight-Ridder’s 30 newspapers, developing training programs, producing critiques, assisting with strategic planning. He specialized in issues involving newsroom “change” and civic journalism.
David Steves has covered politics and state government for The Register-Guard of Eugene since 1999. He has covered Oregon political news as a reporter, editor or columnist since 1991. He began his journalism career in 1988 at the Salem Statesman Journal after a series of temporary stints and internships at five Washington state newspapers. Steves graduated from Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Wash. He lives in Tualatin with his wife and two daughters.
Michael Werner is a visiting instructor of news and editorial journalism at the University of Oregon. He’s a Facebook- and Twitter-aholic, who somehow finds time for journalism. A narrative writer and documentary moviemaker based in Oregon, Michael has not traditionally had such a cozy relationship with technology. He started his career as a newspaper reporter and has worked for papers in Minnesota, Florida and Costa Rica. During that time he developed a deep mistrust of technology, especially recalcitrant laptops that balk at deadlines. But a funny thing happened in graduate school at the University of Oregon – he became enamored with new media technology. He currently serves as the associate editor of Etude: The Journal of Literary Nonfiction, and helps produce multimedia stories for the publication.
Christian Wihtol
Senior Editor, The Register-Guard
Christian Wihtol is senior editor of The Register-Guard newspaper in Eugene, overseeing the newsroom’s five teams of reporters, local content on the daily’s front page and also short-term and long-range story planning for page one. He has been with the Register-Guard since 1990, first employed as the paper’s business team editor and then as government team editor. He began his career in journalism as a business reporter in 1985.
Peter Wong has been a Capitol Bureau reporter for the Statesman Journal in Salem since 2000. He is president of the Oregon Legislative Correspondents Association, and since 2005, dean of the Capitol press corps. He has written about state government for two other Oregon newspapers, the Mail Tribune in Medford (1989-2000) and The News-Review in Roseburg (1979-89), where he also reported on county government. While at the Mail Tribune, he spent legislative sessions in Salem, so he knows the Capitol’s back stairways. His first job was at a daily newspaper in Ontario, Calif. He went to the University of Southern California, where he studied journalism and political science and also had internships in Providence, R.I., and Washington, D.C.
Les Zaitz is a senior investigative reporter at The Oregonian. He has been a journalist in Oregon for more than 30 years, including 18 years at The Oregonian and 13 years as publisher/editor at the weekly Keizertimes, a paper that regularly won enterprise and investigating reporting honors despite having a news staff of two reporters. Zaitz’s own reporting honors include state, regional and national journalism awards for his reporting, including the George L. Polk Award this year. He is an expert in Oregon public records law.
