(via Times Square Alliance)

If you have to be on TV until 11:35 on New Year's Eve, what do you do at midnight?

KTVL Medford anchor John Overall:

By 11:30 I’ll be sweeping up all the hair I pulled out earlier in the evening, 11:45 I’ll hit the road… and by midnight all I can say is I have a drink in my hand somewhere, somehow. Probably at a local pub with a bunch of strangers, or all alone at home.

KOHD Bend anchor Jay Frank:

I never linger those nights. The scanners are a nightmare of false reports of gun shots. This year, that night will be an afterthought; the following day brings our biggest news audience ever -- Rose Bowl on KOHD!

KVAL Eugene anchor Denae D'Arcy:

I hope to anchor a fantastic KVAL News at 11 cast and then drive quickly (but safely) to the pub to toast the New Year with co-workers and friends at midnight. The real problem with working New Year’s Eve is that everyone is tanked by the time you join them.

KGW Portland anchor Wayne Havrelly:

Yes I will be working New Year's Eve. I will be ringing in the New Year driving home to Camas while chatting with my wife on the Bluetooth phone. I guess I should set the clocks back 15 minutes so we can bring in the New Year together!

And KOIN Portland icon Mike Donahue:

No painting the town for me. I’ll drive home and watch the New Year’s Eve coverage on TV for awhile. At midnight, I’ll toast and kiss my wife and go to bed. That’s the way I begin most new years. The one exception was the year 2000 when I stood on a fire escape over Pioneer Square and counted down to the celebration LIVE on television.

UPDATE (12/31, 10:01 pm): KGW Portland meteorologist Rod Hill adds:

At 11:30, I will drive home, walk in my house and kiss my two doggies and say HAPPY NEW YEAR!!! And go to bed.

A few of the stories I missed this past week:

• Today's Oregonian carried the obituary for George "Bud" Beachwood, KOIN's announcer since the station's inception in 1953. Beachwood also hosted outdoors and public affairs shows until his retirement in 1987. He died on November 19 at the age of 88.
• Nineteen year-old newsletter Oregon Health News has folded due to economic troubles. Willamette Week called the publication a "hard-hitting source of information" and a "valuable resource to lawyers, lawmakers and journalists across the state."
• Abraham Hyatt, founder of Digital Journalism Portland and former managing editor of Oregon Business Magazine, is now the production editor at ReadWriteWeb, a large and influential blog on web technology that includes other Portlanders on their team. Hyatt tells Silicon Florist why RWW is "essentially the type of model that everyone in the so-called traditional media is looking towards."
• The third hour of the Thom Hartmann Show, which broadcasts from KPOJ in Portland, is now simulcast on cable network Free Speech TV, as All Access reports. Hartmann is also hosting a daily half-hour show for the station.
• And there's a question in our forums: When on-air talent jump around between TV stations, do they ever slip and say the wrong station?

As is often the case, a couple of these stories were found via the Portland Radio Message Board.

I'm checking out for turkey day. Till I return, enjoy this, the most infamous story in local TV news history:

Paul Linnman will never live that down. Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.

(This story was originally published on November 23, 2009 at 9:59 am.)

I spent this weekend redesigning OMC, but I also had an eye on the 1000+ tweets from Saturday's "We Make The Media" conference, which instantly became a microcosm of the tensions between old and new media.

It began with keynote speaker and former Spokesman-Review editor Steven A. Smith, who, according to his prepared remarks, said:

Some of you here today may be interested in or already committed to harnessing the new media to advocate for a cause, to opine on issues of the day, to empower and inform people with like ideas and similar interests, to aggregate or pass-along information gathered from other sources, to give voice to everyday citizens on everyday matters, to open the most intimate details of your life through a blog or a Facebook page or a Tweet.

I wish you well.

But I am here today to make the case for journalism.

You can imagine how that went over in the Twitterverse. Most blog posts afterward have since focused the distinct online and offline dimensions of the conference and the disparity between old-school and new-school journalists in general. Here's more of what's being said, largely focused on that digital divide:

Joe Wilson: My views on WeMakeTheMedia event – after the hangover

civics21: We Make The Media: Initial thoughts

thoughts from the spiral: We Make the Media conference

The Next Journalist: We Make the Media

Reporting 1 Blog: We Make the Media

360 Convos: Building a new model may require listening

It's all very meta. For more of the substance of what was discussed, try Smith's keynote and the Twitter transcript, linked above. The above bloggers and others have also promised additional writeups, which we'll link to as they're posted.

UPDATE (11/23, 8:25 pm): I'll quote a bit more from Smith's keynote, regarding citizen journalism and its financial constraints:

Now I’m a huge fan of citizen journalism [...] But [...] they simply don’t have the financial resources to produce the kind of journalism at the heart of our discussions today.

Could any blogger or unsupported citizen journalist dedicate two years and $500,000 (mostly in legal costs) to the investigation of Spokane’s late mayor, Jim West, as we did at The Spokesman-Review?

[...] In general, we have not seen citizen journalists demonstrate the capacity to produce such important work.

But Smith does wish he had been able to find a more respectful term than "hobby journalist" to define such people.

Ron Buel, the founding editor and publisher of Willamette Week and one of the organizers of the event, was frank about the divisions at the event: "The room was divided, and the action was divided. No one did a lot of listening to the other group, nor was there much effort to try to come together." But he also points out a few of the ideas to come out of the conference.

Freelance journalist Michelle Rafter focuses on one of those ideas, to create a Portland journalism incubator. The idea will be discussed more on December 3 at the next Digital Journalism Social Hour.

Marie at ran dum thots has more on the divide at the conference and what she thinks is behind it: "disrupting longstanding social order and traditional ways of handling information."

Steve Woodward at NozzlMedia suggests that, rather than "the future of journalism," there are "futures — plural — of journalism."

In Electrotainment's Crazy Talk podcast, Strange Love Live's Dr. Normal had a postmortem of the conference with Abraham Hyatt of Digital Journalism Portland and Will Radik, former intern for The Portland Mercury. That then evolved into how they themselves would "make the media." The discussion begins around minute 34.

Hyatt also has his own post about the conference, in which he homes in on both a technological gap and a racial gap. BlueOregon's Carla Axtman talks more about the element of race at the conference toward the end of this post.

There's also a Google Group about the conference, and OurPDX has a great roundup of links, many of which I used here.

As everyone now knows, and as was posted to the forums last evening, Oprah is quitting syndication to move to her own network, OWN, in 2011. Of the thousands of articles on the subject, you might try these from Time and Broadcasting & Cable. Oprah's Oregon affiliates (KGW Portland, KVAL Eugene, KDRV Medford and KTVZ Bend) now have a little over a year to decide what to do with their 4 pm evening news lead-ins. Will KGW be the fourth Portland station with a 4 pm newscast? See the email from The Oprah Winfrey Show that was sent to KGW and other affiliates below the break.

Some radio news, mostly via the Portland Radio Message Board:

• KKCW (103.3) is now "K103, Portland's Official Christmas Music Station." The insanity started at noon today with Trans-Siberian Orchestra's "Christmas Eve/Sarajevo 12/24."
• The FCC has shut down an unlicensed low-power AM station in Stayton by the name of KENC for operating beyond the limitations of such low-power stations. KENC provides news, traffic and music and continues to stream online.
• Alpha Broadcasting has promoted Candace Gonzales from Director of Marketing & Promotion for KINK to Events & Sponsorship Sales Manager for the entire cluster.
• And you can now catch last weekend's episode of Live Wire Radio via podcast, in which Portland's newest morning radio team, Shauna and The Jacker, may or may not be a parody of certain events in local radio performed by Rick Emerson and Tara Dublin at the 49:40 mark.

In meta news, some changes are coming to OMC this weekend, in both its layout and its format. I'll also have some news next week on December's Media Circus.

• In Seattle, KOMONews.com has gotten a new look, and Troy McGuire, general manager of Fisher Interactive, tells OMC that similar redesigns are slated for KATU and KVAL. Fisher's sites are developed by Broadcast Interactive Media, who also designed the new KGW.com and other Belo web properties. [11/20 update: A point of clarification: The actual design of the KOMO sites were by Fisher staff.]
• A secretly felon-owned radio station in Klamath Falls has been ordered shut down by the FCC. KRAT "The Rat" (97.7) was falsely registered to a man who had nothing to do with the station. Rather, it was owned by one Sandra Soho, who has 17 felony convictions to her name and has been in jail since earlier this year.
• KVAL reporter Addison Taylor has added weather to his duties this week. He'll be reporting in the morning and doing weather at noon, filling the place of Joe Raineri, who moved to weekends at KATU.
• KBPS (1450) has a new website. The station has its studios, transmitter and tower on the campus of Benson Polytechnic High School. It's the second-oldest station in Portland, behind AM 620, formerly KGW-AM.
• As was pointed out in the forums, the Portland Tribune has a story on Bob "The Big BA" Ancheta, one of the famed "KISN Good Guys," who's celebrating his 40th year on the radio. He can now be heard Sundays from 7 to 10 pm on KINK (101.9). [11/19 update: He "wanted" to be a KISN Good Guy, the article states.]
• And New Oregonian publisher Chris Anderson has a writeup in The Daily Barometer, the Oregon State University paper he used to edit.

• Willamette Week Managing News Editor Hank Stern lists the names of 43 people planning to take The Oregonian's buyout offer.
• KATU's Deb Knapp says she's returning to the anchor desk in two weeks. She gave birth to her baby Lila on September 8.
• Tualatin Valley Fire & Rescue PIO Brian Barker answers whether he misses being a reporter for KATU in a blog entry from earlier this month:
  

  I am fulfilling many childhood fantasies racing around in fire engines and learning the fire business. I've been attending classes at the fire academy and getting sweaty and dirty. It is awesome. I get to wear a uniform and represent a group of men and women who I respect tremendously. I feel good about what I do. ...

  So, do I miss TV news? Yes, I do. I miss the camaraderie of racing around from disaster to disaster with a photographer. It was a daily adventure and you never knew where you'd end up. I miss traveling across the region and seeing amazing things before anyone else. I miss the kind of story telling I spent 11 years doing.

• And KVAL's Denae D'Arcy takes issue with anonymous commenters posting insults online:
  

  At kval.com our administrator uses the commenting feature on our stories. That means, anyone in the world-wide-web can post an opinion, insults, threats and lies in the small section after our stories. You don't know who they are and their accounts are verfied by an email that may not be tied to a real person.

  This is new territory.

  As a television news journalist at KVAL, I'm required to post my story on our website, with my name and video of the piece. There's no protection against people telling me my work is "crap" and that I am "ignorant and inexperienced" and "trash." Ouch. Constructive criticism is important and I always respond to viewer emails but this goes past that.

(Thank you to OMC Volunteer Jordan Frasier for contributing leads.)

• A storm in Astoria blew the antenna off the tower for community radio KMUN (91.9) this morning. Until the antenna can be repaired, KMUN's programming can be heard on Coast Community Radio sister station KCPB (90.9). But due to the smaller coverage area of KCPB, listeners may prefer to use online streaming.
• OMC has learned that, after over 20 years with the company, Mike Carter, executive vice president and general manager of Brooke Communications in Roseburg, will be leaving at the end of the month. Brooke operates country KRSB (103.1), adult hits KKMX (104.5), news/talk KQEN (1240) and sports KSKR (101.1, 1490). Carter also hosted middays on KRSB. He cited personal reasons for his departure.
• And former KATU and KGW news director Mike Rausch is moving to Mobile, Alabama CBS affiliate WKRG, owned by Media General. Since leaving KATU in 2006, he's been president and CEO of online training company Whitlock Training Group.

Portland City Commissioner Randy Leonard filled in as host of The Lars Larson Show today, and his guest for the first hour was Matt Davis, news editor of The Portland Mercury.

In a blog entry yesterday, Davis was harshly critical of Willamette Week's current cover story on Leonard by Nigel Jaquiss. On the show, Davis called the story "two pages of salacious gossip about [Leonard's] personal life," which he thought was retribution for Leonard's defense of Mayor Sam Adams following a sex scandal Jaquiss revealed.

In Jaquiss' profile of Leonard, he calls the commissioner "the most dominant elected official in Portland," filling a power vacuum ever since the scandal. He writes, "observers increasingly worry that he wields too much power—and is accountable to nobody."

Jaquiss writes that Leonard's political decisions "often turn on personal relationships," that he has a "skill at working the public treasury for his benefit," and that an "unusual number of people with personal connections to Leonard are, or were, on the city payroll." Jaquiss provides evidence for those claims and also describes several controversies and personal dramas that Leonard has faced in recent and not-so-recent years.

There was a 2005 Oregonian story that unearthed problems Leonard had in 1985: an 80-hour suspension from the Portland Fire Bureau for driving drunk, and a court document filed by his then-wife alleging alcohol abuse, verbal abuse and physical abuse. Leonard admitted to drunk driving but denied any domestic violence to The Oregonian and Willamette Week. Leonard's wife, Regina, was granted a protective order by the court.

The Oregonian's story was controversial in 2005, but editor Tom Dietzel told the paper's public editor that he's "always inclined to publish information that the newspaper learns about public officials and what factors might influence their actions. The role of the newspaper is to publish, not withhold."

That public editor, Michael Arrieta-Walden, also defended the story, saying, "Revisiting 20-year-old allegations ... understandably may look like a cheap shot to some readers -- even though I believe it was essential to bring the information to public attention. Only continually being a watchdog of public officials will ensure that allegations are current, and seem precisely on target."

Jaquiss' story also reveals a Multomah County District Attorney's investigation this year into an allegation that, in the early '80s, Leonard steered Fire Bureau contracts to his brother's sprinkler business. Both Leonard and his brother deny wrongdoing. The DA's case was closed, having found no evidence of unethical conduct. But Jaquiss writes that the investigation "seemed cursory."

Davis describes Jaquiss' article as a collection of largely old, unproven and/or previously reported information and calls it "a hit piece. Pure and simple." He says he feels Jaquiss did a bunch of work, didn't find anything relevant, and published anyway.

But his strongest objections are to publishing details of Leonard's divorce, as well as of his daughter's drug addiction and legal problems. That includes quoting a letter his daughter wrote to a judge admitting to 12 years of addiction. "Unforgivable," Davis calls it. "I see no reason to drag the young woman into the story."

Jaquiss, for his part, said he's "not going to respond to a competitor's opinions and speculation. I'm still working on the second part of the piece, which will run next week, and will let readers judge for themselves both now and next week whether my reporting on Commissioner Leonard has merit."

Asked how he determines whether to publish sensitive details about a public figure's personal life, Jaquiss wrote, "My editors and I weigh whether the details of a public figure's personal life intersect with or have relevance to the public figure's professional duties or performance. In this case, we decided they did."

As for Leonard, when asked by Davis whether Jaquiss crossed a line, he said, "I don't even know where the line is anymore."

Asked this morning by OMC why he would answer questions about his daughter and divorce for the record, Leonard did not respond.

KGW.com relaunched this morning with a new logo and layout. Centered against a white background, the site resembles other Belo web properties recently updated by Broadcast Interactive Media, such as NWCN.com and KREM.com.

A welcome post on the site bills the new features as:

• Faster loading pages
• More news content and fewer ads “above the fold”
• A wider and cleaner news layout
• Streamlined navigation
• An expanded list of top news headlines
• Improved search
• Higher quality video - now with a new Full-Screen option!
• An “Embed” feature which now allows you to share or post video on your site
• Improved photo and video uploading via “Your Pics”

Broadcast Interactive also designed KATU.com and other Fisher Communications websites.