OR–SPJ-Central Oregon Conference

The Bulletin and Society of Professional Journalists co-host Oregon media to the first training conference to be hosted in Central Oregon.

Date: March 21

Location: Oregon State University-Cascades, 1500 SW Chandler Ave, Bend

The day-long event features three sessions:

8:30 a.m.: Opening reception

9:30 a.m.: The Bulletin editor Gerard O’Brien, keynote address “Community newspapers — The heart, hub and hard facts.”

10 a.m.: Data journalism — routine and investigative: Reliable data, by the numbers, finding stories, digging for digits

Rachel Alexander, education and nonprofits reporter at Salem Reporter. Alexander uses data expertise to tell in-depth stories about what’s happening in Oregon’s capital city. She previously worked at The Spokesman-Review and Walla Walla Union-Bulletin newspapers in Washington.

Melissa Lewis, data reporter at Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting, Portland. Lewis has an education in research science, but she spent her early career doing programming and data analysis before becoming a data editor at The Oregonian. At Reveal, she covers criminal justice and homelessness.

Tim Doran, news editor and U.S. Census guru at The Bulletin, Doran is a data nerd who tracks facts and figures from the number of airplane passengers each year at the local airport to building permits and he’s covered three U.S. Censuses. He came to The Bulletin from the Detroit Free Press, where he covered federal courts and agencies and reported on criminal trials such as the Oklahoma City bombing and the Detroit Mafia.

11:15 a.m.: Solutions Journalism: Reporting what’s wrong, identifying who can or should fix it and making sure community leaders are held accountable

Nichole Dahmen, University of Oregon, according to Dahmen’s biography on the university website, the School of Journalism and Communication at the University of Oregon’s associate professor’s research focuses on ethical and technological issues in visual communication, with an emphasis on photojournalism in the Digital Age. She also has a special interest in contextual reporting, specifically solutions journalism and restorative narrative.

Camilla Mortensen, Eugene Weekly editor-in-chief, Solutions journalism is part of the regular routine at Mortensen’s magazine where reporters have used the approach on multiple issues including homelessness. Mortensen, who has a Ph.D in comparative literature and a master’s in folklore, also teaches writing and news writing at Lane Community College.

12:30 p.m.: Lunch will be catered in the campus dining hall

1:45 p.m.: Covering wildfires

David Benda, Record Searchlight: Benda has been a reporter at the Redding Record Searchlight in California for 28 years. He’s a columnist, business reporter, health fellow and he’s covered several massive wildfires in California including the Fountain Fire in 1992, the Jones Fire just 10 miles outside Redding in 1999, the Klamathon Fire in 2018 near the California-Oregon border and the devastating Carr Fire in the summer of 2018.

Bobbi Doan, Oregon Department of Forestry, public affairs and public information officer

Jean Nelson-Dean, Deschutes National Forest, public information officer

Additional panelists TBA

3:15 p.m.: Conference concludes