Beat Check with The Oregonian

The senior vice president at DHM Research decodes his firm's recent polling on the Portland mayor's race, voter attitudes about downtown and more. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

At the end of September, when the federal government canceled Oregon’s first-ever offshore wind lease sale, many people were left with questions about why and what’s next. The announcement from the U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management came after Gov. Tina Kotek sent a letter to the agency asking it to stop the Oct. 15 auction. Kotek cited tribal opposition and a tribal lawsuit among the reasons...

On the latest Beat Check, Oregonian/OregonLive reporters Shane Dixon Kavanaugh and Julia Silverman discuss the prospects of Portland mayoral hopefuls Rene Gonzalez, Carmen Rubio and Keith Wilson. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The general election is fast approaching and Oregon journalists are working hard to inform voters. The Oregonian/OregonLive’s politics team is tackling everything from congressional races to local measures. A particular focus this fall is Portland’s new ranked-choice voting system. Jamie Goldberg, who with Betsy Hammond leads the newsroom’s politics team, joined Editor Therese Bottomly for a conve...

Connie Chung is an icon. It’s been almost 20 years since she was regularly on air, but she’s still a household name and a namesake for a generation of Asian American women. Americans remember her as one of the faces of the news, from the 1970s through the early 2000s. She interviewed Nixon and Oregon’s one-time Olympic darling-turned-national villain, Tonya Harding and covered the events that rock...

School is back in session, but September has been warmer than usual. Thousands of students in the Portland area were let out of school early or had classes canceled earlier this month as temperatures reached triple digits and dirty air from wildfires in the region triggered air quality alerts. With extreme weather events on the rise both during summers and winters, schools are being forced to adju...

Portland City Hall is on the verge of some truly monumental changes, ranging from the radical transformation of how the city’s government operates to an historic election in November that will usher in a new mayor and expanded 12-member City Council. The work to get here has now been years in the making. Few have followed the twists and turns of this civic saga as closely as Maja Viklands Harris....

 new wave energy test site is nearly complete off the Oregon coast. The site, overseen by Oregon State University, will allow private developers to test devices that can harness the power of ocean waves, a technology that’s still in its infancy. The hope is that wave energy can become another major source of clean, renewable electricity akin to solar or wind power and can help power the world’s cl...

Last month, watchdog reporter Ted Sickinger published an in-depth article examining a loophole in the Oregon Lottery’s rules. In Oregon, it is perfectly legal to re-sell your winning lottery ticket at a discount, allowing the buyer to claim the prize. Why would anyone do this? Well, if they wanted to avoid having the state seize part of their winnings for taxes or back child support, for example....

The 2024 fire season so far hasn’t encroached on as many highly populated areas or forced as many mass evacuations as some recent years. But it’s been historic nonetheless. More acres have burned across the state than in any year since at least 1992, when officials started keeping a reliable tally. Sujena Soumyanath and Fedor Zarkin, public safety reporters for The Oregonian/OregonLive, discussed...

Portland, like much of Oregon, is still in the throes of a housing crisis. Rents and home prices continue to squeeze some residents and move further out of reach for many more. Developers who could help reverse these troubling tends are skittish. Meanwhile, the dream of converting swaths of empty offices in Portland’s beleaguered downtown to apartments remains elusive and unlikely to materialize i...

This summer marked the debut of The Oregonian/OregonLive’s first long-form serial narrative podcast with Wondery. “Happily Never After” rapidly climbed the charts and left listeners wanting more about the case of Nancy Crampton Brophy, convicted of murdering her husband, a Portland chef. Reporter Zane Sparling, who covers Multnomah County Courts for The Oregonian/OregonLive, held an “Ask Me Anythi...

A new state-wide coalition wants to add an environmental rights amendment to the Oregon Constitution. It would enshrine the right to a healthy environment in the Bill of Rights. Proponents say making the right to a healthy environment a fundamental right is key in the era of human-made climate change. Right now, such a right is not explicitly spelled out in Oregon and only a few states – Montana,...

Few helped define the Portland food scene that would fuel the city’s glowing reputation for innovation and creativity the last two decades than Naomi Pomeroy, the celebrated chef, cookbook author and James Beard Award winner. Pomeroy died July 13 in a tragic accident while floating on the Willamette River near her hometown of Corvallis. She was just 49. On the latest Beat Check, Oregonian/OregonLi...

Many consumers want to do their part to slow down global warming and they’re flocking to companies that try to do less harm to the planet. Companies, in turn, love to claim they’re environmentally friendly, sustainable or carbon neutral. Because in a world battered by climate change, it’s not just morally right to fight climate change, it also pays off. Nike, the world’s largest sports apparel bra...

Forecasts for this past weekend called for another lengthy heatwave, with temperatures exceeding 100 degrees for four days in a row — maybe longer. This won’t be the Portland area’s hottest stretch. That was a 2021 heat wave when temperatures hit 116 degrees. About 100 people died in Oregon. But this 2024 heat wave might end up among the longest, which weather officials say could be similarly dang...

Longtime reporter Tom Hallman Jr. retired last week after nearly 44 years at The Oregonian. His byline is a favorite for readers who know he will deliver a feature story well worth their time. Hallman joins Editor Therese Bottomly on “Beat Check with The Oregonian” to talk about his career and what goes into his style of writing and reporting. Hallman won the Pulitzer Prize for his feature “The Bo...

Authorities in Oregon have known for over three decades that groundwater in the eastern part of the state, a rural region where many people rely on domestic wells for drinking water, is contaminated with high levels of nitrates and unsafe to drink – yet, until recently, have done little to address the problem. Until 2022, many people in the region had no idea they had been drinking contaminated wa...

Across Oregon, county and city leaders say they don’t have the money to maintain their streets and sidewalks. In the Portland area, a pair of mega transportation projects years in the making remain unfinished and drastically underfunded. All the while, the Oregon Department of Transportation says will require an annual $1.8 billion boost to meet a growing list of transit needs throughout the state...

Way back in 2011, policymakers in Oregon set an ambitious goal. By 2025, 80 percent of the state’s 25- to 34-year-old residents would have some kind of college credentials. The deadline is next year, and the state won’t come close. Instead, college-going rates have been on the decline in Oregon for the last decade, particularly among certain groups of high school students, including boys from rura...

Laura Hill was about 30 years old when she helped create one of Portland’s most-iconic designs. When the Port of Portland was redesigning Portland International Airport in 1986, architecture and design firm SRG Partnership led the project. Hill retired from the firm in 2008, but at the time she was a principal interior designer for SRG. In this bonus episode of Beat Check with The Oregonian, repor...

True crime is popular in the podcast world, and romance novels are seeing a surge in popularity. The Oregonian/OregonLive’s new podcast, in partnership with Wondery, marries the two topics for a six-part exclusive look at the case of Nancy Crampton Brophy, who was convicted of murdering her husband, Dan. Reporters Zane Sparling, who covered the trial, and Shane Dixon Kavanaugh, who reported on her...

In recent years, people have killed increasingly larger numbers of wolves in Oregon as the animals have rebounded in the state. And poisoning has emerged as one of the most common tools used to target wolves. Roblyn Brown, wolf program coordinator with the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, talked on Beat Check about the poisonings, what they mean in the context of Oregon’s stagnant wolf popu...

Portland and Multnomah County voters are casting ballots this week in a number of local contested races. Candidates in each of them have offered competing visions for how to best address some of the most pressing issues facing Oregon’s most populous county — be it crime, livability concerns or the deadly fentanyl crisis. In particular, the outcome in the race between Multnomah County District Atto...

The Oregonian/OregonLive last week published the results of a series of polls that shed light on the sentiments of Portland-area residents heading into a May election. John Horvick, senior vice president of polling partner DHM Research, joined the podcast Beat Check with The Oregonian to review the results and discuss some of the most interesting findings. Also on the panel are reporters Mike Rogo...