Keynote Address
Clint Brewer, SPJ President
The City Paper in Nashville, Executive Editor
Brewer is a four-time winner of the Malcolm Law Memorial Award, Tennessee’s most prestigious award for investigative journalism, and reporters in his charge have also twice won the award, as well as public service awards and a national journalism award. His reporting has led to one criminal prosecution and caused presidential and campaign committees to return contributions made by felons. Brewer got his start as a music critic and for two years owned his own weekly newspaper.
Dean Abbott
Online Sales Director, The Columbian
Dean has been in the news advertising and content business for more than 30 years. During that time, he has worked with UPI, managed a syndicate, and was on the development team with AOL, Gannett and USA WEEKEND. Before joining the Columbian, Dean worked at Lee Enterprises in the Interactive Media department where he led multi-department training and sales strategies seminars and workshops. Dean is a recent transplant from Southern California (he asks that you don’t hold that against him) and is enjoying the Northwest with his wife, Diann, and kids JD and Lauren.
Steve Bagwell
McMinnville News-Register
Steve Bagwell is the managing editor of the News-Register in McMinnville, where he supervises a staff of 18, including some of the state’s hardest hitting young reporters. He’s built a career on turning promising beginners into talented journalists, partly as an editor and also as an instructor. Bagwell teaches courses in reporting, advanced reporting, mass communication and copyediting at both Oregon State University and Linfield College. He is the former managing editor of the Bend Bulletin and has worked as editorial page editor at the Statesman Journal and a reporter and photographer at the Daily Astorian and the Springfield News. Bagwell has been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for public service journalism and won numorous accolades for enterprise and investigative journalism and for public service journalism.
Joe Barrentine
Multimedia Producer, Tacoma News Tribune
Barrentine worked in small dailies and weeklies as a still photographer and sports reporter before getting his bachelor’s degree in communication from Washington State University. After graduating, Joe spent about two years at the Spokesman-Review in Spokane as a web editor, photographer and multimedia producer. Joe recently moved home to Tacoma, where he is the News Tribune’s first multimedia producer.
Rebecca Clarren
newspaper?
Rebecca Clarren has been writing about environmental issues, with a special focus on the American West, for the past decade. She started as an editor and reporter for High Country News and then. For the past five years, has been based in Portland, Oregon where she freelances for a variety of national magazines such as Marie Claire, Fortune, Ms Magazine and the Nation. Since October of last year, she’s been writing a new weekly column for Salon.com called “The Good Life,” that takes a smart, skeptical look at environmental/sustainable products and trends. The winner of seven grants from The Fund for Investigative Journalism, Clarren has been named a finalist for both the Alice Patterson Foundation fellowship and the Dorothea Lange-Paul Taylor prize. She lives and types in Northeast Portland.
Steve Collier
Features Copy Editor, The Eugene Register-Guard
George Erb
Editor, Puget Sound Business Journal
He has been a reporter and editor at daily and weekly newspapers in Washington state since 1983. Erb is a past chapter president for the Western Washington Pro Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists. He has long been active in open-government issues. Erb edited two editions of Access, an open-government guide for Washington published by SPJ. He is a director of the Washington Coalition for Open Government and a member of the state Bench-Bar-Press Committee. Erb has a bachelor’s degree in history from Hanover College and a master’s degree in journalism from the University of Oregon.
Patricia Foote
Assistant Managing Editor/Administration, The Seattle Times
Patricia oversees staffing, training, policies, compensation and other issues in the newsroom. She has been with the Times in two separate stints for more than 30 years. Foote started her newspaper career at age 15 as a vacation fill-in at The Highline Times, followed by other South King County weeklies. She was hired by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer to edit its weekly entertainment section before becoming a reporter in the Seattle Times View section in 1973. Her assignments included arts-and-entertainment editor and lifestyle editor before leaving in 1986 to teach journalism at the University of Washington.
She returned to the Times in 1990 as news-features editor and was subsequently named assistant managing editor for features, and later for hiring and staff development. She is a 1971 graduate of the University of Washington with a degree in communications. Her professional memberships include the Society of Professional Journalists. The Times was nationally honored for its features sections during her tenure and she received The Times’ Publisher’s Circle Award in 1998.
Ryan Frank
Reporter, The Oregonian
Christy George
Radio/TV reporter/Editor, Oregon Public Broadcasting
Jack Hart
The Oregonian
Jack Hart is an author, writing coach and former managing editor at The Oregonian, the Pacific Northwest’s largest daily newspaper. At The Oregonian, he also worked as a reporter, arts and leisure editor, Sunday magazine editor, training editor, editor at large and writing coach. He has additional reporting experience at two other newspapers, holds a University of Wisconsin doctorate in Mass Communications and has taught at five universities. He worked as an editor on four Pulitzer Prize winners, and was the sole editor on two of them. He has also edited national winners of the ASNE writing awards, the Ernie Pyle award, the Scripps-Howard business-writing award, the Overseas Press Club awards, the Headliners awards and the Society of Professional Journalists feature-writing award. He is the author of “The Information Empire; a history of the Los Angeles Times” and “A Writer’s Coach: The Complete Guide to Writing Strategies That Work,” released as a Pantheon hardback in 2006 and as an Anchor Books paperback in 2007.
Beth Hyams
Radio News Editor, Oregon Public Broadcasting
Brian Immel
Multimedia Producer, Spokesman-Review, Spokane
His job is to enable reporters and photographers to utilize the strengths of the web as well as produce original content online. In his free time, he experiments with alternative methods of storytelling. He rarely sleeps, is always plotting and is never afraid to try something new.
Steve Law
Reporter, Portland Tribune
Celeste LeCompte
Managing Editor, Sustainable Industries Magazine
Celeste LeCompte is the managing editor of Sustainable Industries magazine, a 5-year-old environmental business magazine based in San Francisco. Previously, she covered food and agriculture, recycled markets, energy and biofuels for the magazine. Celeste graduated from Harvard College with a bachelor’s degree in Social Studies, and wrote her undergraduate thesis about community organizing around organic agriculture.
James Marks
The Portland Tribune
James is a University of Oregon graduate who began his career as a photojournalist, graphic artist and page designer at the Springfield News. He became Webmaster of the Pamplin Media Group two years ago after five years of work as a page designer and graphic artist for the Portland Tribune. Marks first learned to program by writing scripts to automate Tribune page production and by building databases to handle story management. He next turned to web programming and ultimately designed the content management system and web templates used by the Pamplin Media Group. As part of his efforts he has extensively researched web readership and its relationship to print circulation. He continues to shape the future of the Pamplin enterprise both online and in print.
Erin Middlewood
Reporter, Columbian
TJ Mullinax
Yakima Herald-Republic
TJ Mullinax is web producer for the Yakima Herald-Republic. He works with nearly every department to improve news presentation and creation of new storytelling methods for the newspaper online. Since his early days in journalism at Washington State University’s Daily Evergreen, he has been a new media junkie. He started his career in Portland working as a Web Producer at KATU Television. There he helped refine the online news work flow and encouraged crews to go beyond providing only video stories, but provide text, still photos and live blog-style reporting from the field. His current workload includes training newspaper staff to shoot and edit video, helping facilitate multimedia opportunities and every now and then, gets out of the office. He recently coordinated the Northwest Video Workshop, bringing together 40 journalists to learn about video shooting, editing and storytelling. TJ also serves as the National Press Photographers Association’s, Region 11 associate director.
Frank Mungeam
newspaper?
Frank is an award-winning digital media and television manager with twenty years experience for network affiliates in Seattle (NBC) and Portland (NBC, ABC), where he has earned nine Emmy nominations for Web and TV writing and producing. Since 2006, he has been Internet site manager for kgw.com, named Best TV Web Site in Oregon by the Associated Press in 2007. Previously, he was director of new media for katu.com. Mungeam is a two-time finisher of the Boston Marathon, a top-25 finisher at the Portland Marathon, and earned All-American honors at the US National Snowshoe Racing Championships. He’s also the author of the popular men’s pregnancy book “A Guy’s Guide to Pregnancy,” and the proud co-author of a son, David. A native of Boston, Mungeam graduated with honors from Harvard with a degree in Psychology and Social Relations.
Maureen O’Hagan
The Seattle Times
Maureen is a reporter for The Seattle Times, covering the state Department of Social and Health Services. Before that, she was a court reporter for The Washington Post and a legal affairs writer for Willamette Week. In 1999-2000, she studied law and creative writing as a Michigan Journalism Fellow. She has been the recipient of numerous state, regional, and national journalism awards. Her series, “Coaches who prey” was a 2004 finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Public Service. She was part of a team of reporters on “Your courts, their secrets”, a series which was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
Jon Palfreman
newspaper?
Jon is an Emmy, Dupont and Peabody Award-winning journalist. His published work includes more than forty hours of prime-time television documentaries (for BBC and PBS), and two books. His recent focus has been in-depth investigative reports centered on the intersection of science and technology, policy and law, with such films as: “NOVA/FRONTLINE: What’s up with the Weather” (about global climate change); “FRONTLINE: Currents of Fear” (about the alleged health effects of power lines); and “NOVA/FRONTLINE: Harvest of Fear” (about genetically modified food).
Don Ray
newspaper
Don is high-energy, interactive, and among the top journalism trainers in the West. He’s a California-based veteran, multimedia investigative reporter/producer, author and lecturer. He’s the journalist who first broke the story of the police investigation into child molestation allegations against singer Michael Jackson in 1993. He’s written for scores of publications including the L.A. Weekly and the L.A. Times. He’s produced segments for Dateline NBC, Inside Edition, The Crusaders and numerous local TV stations. He has traveled to more than 30 countries as a journalist, documentary producer or journalism trainer. In fact, he’ll arrive in Portland the same day he returns from a three-week training assignment in Baku, Azerbaijan. He’s written books on investigations, public records, writing for the ear, interviewing, background checks and privacy issues.
Jim Redden
Reporter and Editor, Portland Tribune
Scott Silver
Oregon Public Broadcasting
Hank Stern
Managing Editor, Willamette Week
Larry Tuttle
newspaper?
Laurence “Larry” Tuttle is the founding director of the Center for Environmental Equity. Established in 1994, the Center is an advocate for communities and natural resources degraded by mineral mining pollution. Tuttle has worked as the regional director or executive officer of environmental organizations from 1989 to 1994. He served on the Deschutes County, Oregon board of county commissioners from 1982 to 1986.
Tuttle’s background includes 16 years in commercial banking and small-business consulting. Tuttle received a B.S. in Finance from the University of Oregon in 1969.
Lee van der Voo
newspaper
Lee Van der Voo is a reporter for the Portland Tribune and runs this web site, along with SPJ’s public records blog for Oregon and Washington. She previously worked for weekly newspapers and the wire and got her start in journalism on the arts beat. Van der Voo has won several journalism awards, including a 2007 prize from the Society of Environmental Journalists. She spends a lot of time on the computer.
Aaron Weiss
Senior Producer, KGW News Channel 8, Portland
Aaron currently produces the 11 p.m. newscast and is a blogger for kgw.com. He came to Portland in 2002 after beginning his journalism career at KVOA in his hometown of Tucson, Arizona. Before becoming a journalist, Aaron was a program manager at Microsoft, working on UI and shared features in Microsoft Office. His current focus is transforming the way newsrooms gather and distribute information across legacy and emerging platforms. Aaron is a graduate of Wesleyan University.
Laurie Williams
Assisting Managing Editor, Tri-City Herald
Les Zaitz
The Oregonian
Among the most well-reviewed speakers in SPJ’s fall conference, Les is an award-winning senior investigative reporter for 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.
