Tag Archives: Hillsboro Argus

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The long, slow, agonizing death of The Oregonian

newspaperdeath 

Top veteran reporters leaving. Circulation shrinking. Local bureaus closing. Regional papers consolidating. Daily print editions disappearing. Morale sinking.

It’s come to this at our once-proud and prominent newspaper, The Oregonian.

Founded in 1850 as a four page weekly, its first issue printed in a log shack on SW First and Morrison, The Oregonian has a long and storied history.

The headquarters of The Oregonian from 1892 to 1948.

The headquarters of The Oregonian from 1892 to 1948.

In June 1948, The newspaper moved to a new building on Southwest Broadway.

In June 1948, The newspaper moved to a new building on Southwest Broadway.

Daily newspapers like The Oregonian were once pervasive throughout the United States, with many communities having both a morning and evening paper, and sometimes a weekly local paper as well.

When Advance Publications bought The Oregonian in 1950 for $5.6 million, its daily circulation was 214,916. The Portland Metro Area’s population that year totaled 704,829.

Coincidentally, a significant challenge to the newspaper industry’s business model, dependent on print advertising, also began about this time. Although there’s a tendency today to attribute the decline of newspapers to the Internet, it might better be tied to the advent of television, which sucked away advertising dollars that covered costs and generated profits.

In 1950, five years after the advent of commercial television in the United States, television penetration of U.S. households was only 9.0%. By 1955 it was up to 64.5% and by 1960 87.1 percent. As TV penetration grew, newspapers’ share of ad revenue shrank.

Newspapers commanded 37 percent of all U.S. advertising revenues in 1950. By 1960, that share had shrunk to 31 percent, the first downward shift in newspaper advertising since the depression. During that same 10-year period, TV’s share of total advertising rose from 3 to 30 percent.

I joined The Oregonian as a business reporter in 1987. It was a robust, well-respected paper then, with a proud past and a much-anticipated future. Daily Monday-Friday circulation was 319,624; Sunday circulation 375,914.

When I left the paper 10 years later in 1997 to take a corporate communications job, Daily Monday-Friday circulation was 360,000, Sunday circulation 450,000. We were on a roll.

Much of that success has been attributed to Sandra Mims Rowe, who came on as editor in 1993 and tried to energize the newsroom with a hiring spree, bringing on reporters and editors from around the country. Under her leadership, the newsroom grew from about 280 to more than 400 and distinguished itself by winning five Pulitzers.

But the paper wasn’t able to escape the tumult of the newspaper business during her tenure. By the time she retired from The Oregonian in Dec. 2009, she had to cut staff, salaries and benefits as circulation and revenue declined.

In 2009, The Oregonian’s daily circulation sat at 268,572 and Sunday circulation at 344,950, causing the paper to lose its position as one of the top 25 Sunday circulation papers in the country. That same year, the paper announced a long-term policy that protected full-time employees from layoffs for economic or technological reasons would end.

By 2012, daily circulation sank to 228,599, only slightly higher than circulation in 1950, and the declines have continued.

The Oregonian’s footprint will shrink further later this month when three of its Washington County weeklies, the 143-year-old Hillsboro Argus, the 4-year-old Forest Grove Leader and the 3-year-old Beaverton Leader, will meld into one publication, the Washington County Argus. Their consolidation will mean even less local media coverage and impact.

Meanwhile, talented reporters have been fleeing in droves, some pushed out, others motivated by buy-outs. Some have decamped to other papers, others to corporate and government communications jobs. At the same time the once powerful paper has seen its clout diminish as it has abandoned rural Oregon and 7-day-a-week print distribution.

The Oregonian’s enhanced focus on digital news delivery is showing real signs of life, but it’s not maintaining the paper’s prestige and power. Digital numbers on OregonLive.com are up impressively (6,339,000 unique visitors in Jan. 2015). But with the average visitor to a newspaper website only staying on the site for three minutes per visit, many digital visitors to OregonLive.com are short-termers and aren’t loyal Oregonian readers.

In addition, new digital advertising revenue at newspapers across the country is substantially less than the print revenue that is being lost. In 2005, U.S. newspaper ad revenue totaled $49.4 billion, $47.4 billion from print and $2 billion from digital. By 2014, print ad revenue had shrunk by about two-thirds to $16.4 billion, but digital ad revenue had only grown to $3.5 billion, according to the Pew Research Center.

So here we are. A once mighty paper hollowed out and  humbled. A growing population served by a smaller paper. A weakened paper that no longer drives the daily discussion at the proverbial water cooler (or over a latte). A diminished, editorially impotent presence with a dwindling ability to hold powerful interests accountable.

None of this is good news if you want an educated, informed public in a position to make wise judgments about public policy.

“The way to prevent irregular interpositions of the people is to give them full information of their affairs through the channel of the public papers, and to contrive that those papers should penetrate the whole mass of the people,” wrote Thomas Jefferson in 1787.

That is as true today.

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Oregon’s abandonment of higher education: it’s criminal

The Oregon Legislature should be declared a crime scene.

Oregon’s state universities are increasingly that in name only. Because of the Legislature’s calculated callousness or pure indifference in funding Oregon universities, young people across the state are facing soaring college loan debts and diminished opportunities for higher education.

The state is also sabotaging its goal of ensuring that 40 percent of all adult Oregonians have a bachelor’s degree or higher by 2025 and undermining the rationale for the state having a say in the operations of what are still called public universities.

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Governor John Kitzhaber says he deserves to be re-elected because he froze tuition at Oregon colleges.

Sure, for one year.

In June, the state Board of Higher Education approved a tuition freeze for in-state undergraduates for the 2014-2015 academic year.

But that was after steadily escalating tuition rates for in-state undergraduates, particularly after voters approved Measure 5 in 1990 and K-12 school funding shifted to the state, with a devastating impact on state support for higher education that has continued to today.

Over the past 15 years, tuition and fees at the University of Oregon, for example, leaped from $3810 for the 1999-2000 academic year to $9918 for the 2014-2015 academic year.

In other words, since the 1999-2000 academic year, tuition and fees for in-state undergraduates have increased 160 percent. You can’t duck the fact that this
substantially outpaced the 42.8 percent rate of inflation.

During that same period, the state’s share of the University of Oregon’s annual operating budget has been in steady retreat from 17.1 percent in 1999-2000 to 5.5 percent in 2013-2014. Extrapolating this trend, state investment will reach zero by 2022.

Coincident with the loss of state support has been an increase in out-of-state students. In the 2013-2014 academic year, non-residents, undergraduate and graduate, reached 46.5 percent of total enrollment.

The University cloaks the leap in out-of-state students as a well-intentioned effort to ensure diversity, but it’s really all about money. In 2014-2015, for example, while in-state students are paying $9918 in tuition and fees, out-of-state students are paying $30,888.

It could be argued that out-of-state students aren’t displacing in-state students, given that the number of undergraduate in-state students has increased about 20 percent since 1999-2000. The number of out-of-state students, however, mushroomed by 250 percent during the same period.

What that means is that the university is likely drawing fewer students from low-income Oregon families and competing more aggressively for students who can afford a more expensive education. In addition, as the state’s population has increased, it’s getting tougher for in-state students to get in.

Had the state not cut university funding so severely, it could have or kept tuition and fees down or accommodated more in-state students.

The pullback in state funding raises the question of why the state continues to impose its will on the universities in so many ways. “The defunding of public higher education by the states inevitably inaugurates a new conversation about who controls them and whose interests are to be served,” says Thomas Mortenson, senior scholar at The Pell Institute for the Study of Opportunity in Higher Education.

Indeed.

 

Originally published in the Hillsboro Argus, Oct. 28, 2013

 

 

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American businesses: meet your future job applicants

When Ellis Island opened in 1892, it welcomed immigrants escaping war, drought, famine and religious persecution and hoping America would offer them a new start.

Today, the Hillsboro School District is welcoming an increasingly diverse group of students, many of whom left their homes around the world because of brutal wars, punishing poverty, religious and political conflict, violence and/or a simple desire for a better life.

Tobias Elementary School, for example, is filling with children from Central America, Mexico, Ukraine, Thailand, Cambodia, Somalia, Egypt, Iraq and other countries speaking up to 30 languages. The mix depends, to some degree, on where the greatest turmoil and unrest is occurring, according to Steve Callaway, Tobias’ principal.

somalistudents

Many of these students are from low-income and, in many cases, low-educated, families where English is not the first language at home, behaviors and value systems vary widely and the American culture is not deeply embedded.

The shift has been dramatic. In the 1999-2000 school year, Tobias was largely white and culturally homogenous, with just 6.3 percent of the student body from principally mobile Hispanic migrant families and more from a smattering of other ethnicities, including Asian children whose parents worked in high-tech.

By the 2013-2014 school year, minority students from diverse cultures outnumbered white students at Tobias for the first time:

White: 47.8 percent.

Black: 3.5 percent.

Hispanic: 24.7 percent.

Asian/Pacific Islander: 12.2 percent.

American Indian/Alaskan Native: 0.6 percent.

Multiethnic: 11.3 percent.

The trend at Tobias is being replicated at the rest of Hillsboro’s schools, which were 49.5 percent white in the 2013-2014 school year.

Hillsboro School District demographics
Ethnicity No. of students Pct. of students
American Indian 174 0.83
Black 439 2.10
Hispanic 7,475 35.67
Asian 1,341 6.40
Pacific Islander 163 0.78
Multiethnic 965 4.74
White 10,368 48.48
TOTAL 20,955 100.00

Concentrations of children from particular ethnic groups are occurring in certain Hillsboro schools because their families want to live in close proximity. This has led, for example, to 19 Somali students attending Hillsboro’s Imlay Elementary School in the 2013-2014 school year and 15 this school year.

The U.S. Department of Education projects that minorities will outnumber whites among the nation’s public school students for the first time this fall. In other words, the minorities will become the majority.

What this means in the longer term is that Hillsboro’s workforce of the future is going to look quite different from today. Hillsboro’s economic viability and America’s greatness will be diminished if we don’t do all we can to educate these ethnically and culturally diverse children.

It’s critical that we prepare them for success as creative problem solvers and engaged community members in work and life. It’s also essential that we inculcate in them a belief in the American Dream and a commitment to the kind of effort that will bring them social and economic mobility.

“Kids don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care,” says Callaway. There are so many ways local businesses can show much they care about preparing children for work.

Companies can open their facilities to students who want to learn more about the world of work and career options by offering job shadows and paid internships. “All students need to be more aware of what job opportunities are out there,” says Leslie Smith Mayfield, a 3rd grade teacher and STEM Coordinator at Tobias. “We need help from business to expose kids, even in the elementary grades, to what options there are in the real world. Some bright kids are going to go to waste if they don’t realize the options they can work towards.”

Awareness also needs to expand to the skilled trades, which can offer well-paid, stable careers. For example, Callaway says he’d welcome having IBEW workers come in to teach kids about basic electrical circuitry.

Elaine Philippi, manager of student programs at the Business Education Compact, talks up the BEC STEM Connect TM Initiative. Volunteers from a business visit a school at least four times in an academic year, educating the students about their company, engaging students in activities that promote STEM concepts and collaborative processes and helping out at a science night or other community event.

Employees at local businesses can also get involved by helping with field trips, providing reading assistance, giving technical demonstrations, and even presenting on their hobbies. Astronomy and geology hobbyists, for example, have visited Tobias classrooms.

Businesses can give grants of all sizes to enable schools to offer innovative programs. For example, a Tobias teacher secured a grant to support an engineering math program for 6th grade girls.

Equipment can be donated to enhance the learning experience.

Companies can form partnerships with local schools, as FEI, Intel and Vernier have already done with Tobias.

All of this could help boost achievement levels and increase completion rates at Hillsboro’s increasingly diverse schools. That will benefit the local business community down the road when these youngsters enter the job market.

Watch video about Tobias Elementary School

This blog also appeared as a column in the Hillsboro Argus, October 1, 2014