Bend Don't Break: Lily Raff McCaulou

In this episode of Bend Don’t Break, host Aaron Switzer sits down with journalist and author Lily Raff McCaulou. Lily’s writing has appeared in publications such as The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Guardian, Rolling Stone, and The Bulletin, and she is the author of Call of the Mild: Learning to Hunt My Own Dinner, named one of the best books of 2012 by The San Francisco Chronicle.

Aaron and Lily explore her winding path into journalism, what ultimately brought her to Bend, and the surprising journey that led her to write a book about learning to hunt. Lily also shares her perspective on teaching the next generation of reporters as an instructor at Central Oregon Community College and advisor for The Broadside, the college’s student newspaper. Along the way, listeners get a glimpse into the challenges and rewards of modern journalism, the intersection of personal growth and professional storytelling, and the importance of fostering curiosity in both students and readers.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to the Ben Don't Break Podcast. We are powered by the Source, Ben's locally owned media company and weekly newspaper. This podcast is our eddy in the rushing waters of local journalism. We are glad that you're taking some of your time to listen to us chat with the people who shape our local community. Support us through our member program at Bensource.com.

SPEAKER_02 0:22

Thank you to our presenting sponsor, Remax Key Properties, a family-owned, full-service real estate brokerage specializing in residential, luxury, commercial, new construction, and ranch and land properties. Their new state-of-the-art facility at 42 Greenwood Avenue is a modern collaborative space and the new home of the Ben Don't Break Podcast Recording Studio.

SPEAKER_00 0:45

I'm Aaron Sweitzer, publisher of The Source and producer of this Ben Don't Break Podcast. Today we are joined by Lily Raf McCallow. McCullough. McCullough.

unknown 0:56

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 0:57

She's a journalist who has written for the New York Times, The Atlantic, The Guardian, Rolling Stone, The Bulletin. We're familiar with that one, even if you're not well read in the others, though you should be. And many other publications. She has won numerous awards and spent one year as a Knight Wallace Fellow at the University of Michigan. She is the author of one nonfiction book, Call of the Mild, Learning to Hunt My Own Dinner, with the San Francisco Chronicle named one of the best books of 2012. Since 2021, she has worked at Central Oregon Community College as a part-time journalism instructor and advisor for the student newspaper The Broadside. Lily, thanks for spending some time with us today. Thanks for having me. So I'm I'm always like to start these podcasts a little curious of how a Night Wallace fellow at the University of Michigan ends up in Bend, Oregon, with all of the talents that you no doubt displayed back there. How do we get here?

SPEAKER_03 1:54

I moved here in 2004, way before I was a Night Wallace fellow. Oh, okay. But I moved here in 2004 to work for the Bulletin.

SPEAKER_00 2:04

Okay.

SPEAKER_03 2:05

So I had been here once a few years before that on a road trip and thought it was pretty cool. In 2004, I was living in New York City. I'd been there for a few years in Manhattan. And I wanted to get into get a job in journalism. I had I had worked in journalism in college and kind of went a different path after I graduated and wanted to try my hand at it again.

SPEAKER_00 2:34

What did you do while you were swerving?

SPEAKER_03 2:36

I worked in the independent film industry in New York City. So I worked for a movie.

SPEAKER_00 2:41

You didn't stray too far.

SPEAKER_03 2:42

Not well. I worked for um a movie director and writer as his personal assistant, and I PA, I was a production assistant on a bunch of TV shows and movies. Yeah, it was fun. It was fun for a while. And then after a couple years, I kind of looked around and thought, there's a lot of people in their 40s doing what I'm doing. And I had, I had kind of run away from journalism because it had seemed like a really scary time for journalism in 2001. Um, and I just kind of thought, oh, this is this doesn't seem like an industry that's really going anywhere. This would be really, really awful to work in. So I went a different route. And then um, and then after a couple of years in New York and working in film, I thought, you know, I really want to get paid to write. That would be the ideal. Right. Um, so I'm gonna go back to journalism.

SPEAKER_00 3:36

My own stuff, not the my own stuff. Yeah, not the director's stuff.

SPEAKER_03 3:40

I wasn't writing anything, I was running around buying, you know, cranberry juice for people. Um, so so I applied, I went on journalismjobs.com. Do you remember that website?

SPEAKER_00 3:52

Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 3:53

And um I applied to all the jobs in Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and Montana. And the bulletin called me. A couple of places called me, the bulletin called me and um eventually offered me a job and I moved out here. Wow. And the rest is history. I thought I'd be here for a year, maybe two years.

SPEAKER_00 4:12

Were you surprised ever taking that big break that um well, I mean, you're you had been in film, so you were still doing still could have appeared that you were doing some writing, but you took a pretty long time off from the craft and then took the position at the bulletin.

SPEAKER_03 4:28

Yeah, I think I think that the work itself was different. It was so um stress-free compared to working on a movie set.

SPEAKER_00 4:40

I thought it was gonna be the other way around. Like I was a reporter. No, and what had I done? No, I was getting one minute you're getting cranberry juice.

SPEAKER_03 4:48

So easygoing the cranberry juice was like a life or death situation on every movie that I worked on. And so um, I don't know, working in a newsroom was really fun. It was a lot of what I liked the most about working on a movie set, which was a lot of fun, creative people.

SPEAKER_01 5:06

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 5:07

Um, which that's that's the best part of working in a newsroom.

SPEAKER_01 5:10

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 5:11

Every newsroom I've been in has just been fun, funny people. Um, and it's a it's stressful, it can be stressful. Um, but the day-to-day I think we can say it is stressful. It is stressful, but it would the day-to-day was a lot less stressful than what I'd been used to. So it was kind of a nice, a nice.

SPEAKER_00 5:31

You don't hear that very often.

SPEAKER_03 5:33

I know.

SPEAKER_00 5:33

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 5:34

I know. I it makes me realize how toxic some of the some of the movie shoots were. But yeah.

SPEAKER_00 5:41

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 5:42

Well But one thing that was sorry, one thing that I did want to say is that um it's funny to me now looking back on it, that I was scared off from the journalism industry in 2001 because every year. So I mean, I've so now I've been a journalist, you know, for 21 years, and that's just the way it is in journalism. It's always right, it's all there's always a crisis, it's always on the brink of collapse. And I and I and I don't mean to be glib about it, because I think that a lot of the hardship in the industry is really serious and and ongoing and and worsening.

SPEAKER_00 6:19

Well, I think it's fair. I mean, I I do think you you you it is worsening. I mean, in that, but it it's true for those of us who have been in it uh for this long. Um you you we have moved from a uh one crisis to another in terms of oh my gosh, but still we're able to do good work during that time. And yeah, it seems like I'll be doing good work, and you're just you're still in the industry and uh you know, albeit at COCC. Um but it's it's it's still here.

SPEAKER_03 6:54

Yeah, I think it I think it will last too. I'm I'm hopeful about it right now.

SPEAKER_00 7:00

I hope so, because you are the COCC uh instructor of young children. That's true.

SPEAKER_03 7:05

I kind of have to believe in the future of journalism to be teaching it right now. That's one of the things that's been really fun about working at COCC is working with young people who are excited about the future of journalism and excited about storytelling and um not as jaded as some of the people who've been in the business a long time.

SPEAKER_00 7:25

Yeah. Well, full disclosure, I sit, uh I help with uh broadside as well. And um I was that's what I was struck by by going in there. And I I speak to um, you know, middle school classes, high school classes, um, my college students, but that particular group, okay, they're getting into journalism, so they're already starting to separate from their peers in terms of being funny, smart, creative, which that field draws. Yeah. And uh it was at least last year, there was a cool group of cats, and they were they were interested in the and I what I loved about uh talking to those kids was they were interested in the whole thing. I mean, a lot of times you come into those um those learning environments and they're very specific about what they they want to know, writing and the the type of writing that goes into journalism. And these guys were interested in sales, how it works, what how one you know supports the other.

SPEAKER_03 8:25

And yeah, they are I had a real dream team this past year, and a lot of them are coming back next year, so I'm really excited. But um, yeah, I mean I think it's just kind of a testament to their general curiosity and their passion for journalism and like all the different facets of it, like you said. Um, and I call them kids too. And some of them some of them are, but one of the things that's so cool too about the student newsroom at CFCC is it is truly diverse. I mean, we have people um in their 40s and we have people in their teens um and everything in between. Um, and that's been really fun. It's been really fun to have all those different perspectives. Very different from I went to a liberal arts college, and everybody in my student newsroom was between 18 and 22. There were zero exceptions to that.

SPEAKER_01 9:14

Right, right.

SPEAKER_03 9:15

Um, so it's really fun as CSCC just get a lot of different perspectives. You know, we have people who are different ages and um veterans and parents and just um people with you know previous careers and a lot of life experience. And so it's a it's a really neat student newsroom.

SPEAKER_00 9:32

And that's what's cool about community college is you get all these people and different paths on life, and they're but they're still learning, still curious. And uh again, this group was uh especially.

SPEAKER_03 9:44

Yeah, but it they st it still really feels like my college newsroom did too. I mean, it's just it's fun, they get really silly, they're um they're really supportive of one another. Um it's just a it's a really nice, nice creative atmosphere.

SPEAKER_00 10:01

Yeah. And you're um so the broadside, how many uh print publications do you put out each year?

SPEAKER_03 10:08

Well, so um when I started in 2021, the broadside had just turned into an online publication. So if I can just give like a little bit of historical background. In 2018, COC kind of tried to shut down the broadside. Um, and students and alumni and community members rightfully got upset about that and rallied and saved the publication, but it was switched to an online publication because the print costs had gotten so high. And there were some concerns about student engagement, you know, maybe not that many people reading the print editions anymore. Um, at the time it was still coming out um every week or every other week, depending on the time of year. So it was a lot of print um for a small student publication. So um in 2019, they decided, okay, we're gonna reboot the broadside as an online only publication. Um, I came on in 2021 in the fall when um CFCC was just getting back to in-person after the start of the COVID pandemic. And so um one of the things that I did uh my second year at COCC was try to revive a little bit of print. And the reason, I mean, I do I do I do love print. Um, I'm a writer from you know daily newspapers. Um, but the the real reason was I kind of ran into this issue where my students, because everything was being published online, they never experienced any hard deadlines.

SPEAKER_00 11:38

Oh, okay.

SPEAKER_03 11:38

All the deadlines were kind of these self-imposed artificial things that could get pushed back and pushed back and pushed back.

SPEAKER_00 11:44

We struggle with that in the digital world.

SPEAKER_03 11:46

It's it's hard. It's hard, but but in a business setting, there are real deadlines, even for online. In a classroom setting, it's much harder. And so um, I felt like I was doing my students a disservice by never having them experience a really hard deadline. Like when you have a when you have a press reserved for a certain period of time, you have to get your product to them by that time, or you you lose it. You miss out. There's no print product. So um, so I wanted my students to experience that. So we started printing in the um spring of 2023, the end of my second year at COCC. Um, and it was a really great experience for the students. Though there were some students who missed the deadline and their pieces were not included in the print edition. That was a learning life lessons. Exactly. That was a learning experience for them. Um, overall, it was a really positive. And the students were so excited about seeing their work in print and getting to hold it. Um, we had a lot of interest from advertisers who wanted to pay and support the broadside. So um it went really well. The second year we did that again, and then this past year, my students said, we want to do more than one a year. So they published an additional um print product in the winter. Um, and I told the students that if they could sell enough ads to cover the printing costs, we could do an additional. And they and they they blew that goal out of the water. So we printed twice in this past year. Um, and I I know that our editor-in-chief right now would really like to do one print edition each quarter. So that would mean three times a year. Um, we'll see.

SPEAKER_00 13:26

Yeah, growing in print and bucking the trend.

SPEAKER_03 13:30

Well, you know, this younger generation is really into print. Yeah. They like the physical media.

SPEAKER_00 13:36

I was just reading an article about a bunch of um publications that have sprouted up in major cities that are being put out by Gen Z and younger who are fascinated by print. And my son was, I mean, he lives in New York and he was picked up a couple, he was like, that's like vinyl. Yeah. You know, it's like it's like getting the record and we're getting a hard copy of paper. And I was like, you are aging me like badly, but nonetheless, it's it's a pretty cool trend.

SPEAKER_03 14:04

It is a cool trend. I think it's a really, I think it's really cool. It's it's been really fun just seeing all the things that kind of come out of that at CSEC. Little things. I mean, the students, there's a new um, there's a new literary magazine on campus at COCC that started this spring. And um the broadside students learned about that and they actually donated four of the pages from the print edition to the new literary magazine. So um they were able to pay a student designer to design the teaser of the literary magazine and include that in there, which was just a really nice, um, just a nice partnership with this student other student group. Yeah. Um, so it's just been really fun to kind of see what springs out of these big collective group projects that are the print edition.

SPEAKER_00 14:52

My uh bridge to journalism was a literary magazine when I was in grad school. We um I edited the Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association publication, and it was super cool and got me to go to the Boise Weekly and kept going from there. But it was it was that crossover from coming from a literary background to a literary publication, print publication. I was like, what's this?

SPEAKER_03 15:18

There is a tradition. I mean, it's it's sort of outdated now. There are a couple. I there's one that I know of, which is um the newspaper in Bogota, Colombia. Um, El mundo is it's still um, they still commission original poetry, they still have, you know, basically a literature section, some of which includes original short stories and things like that. So I'm there is a tradition for newspapers. I mean, even a big newspaper like the New York Times, it's the Sunday Times is a big, meaty thing that has literature in it, you know.

SPEAKER_00 15:56

Alts like us have always um we I mean, The Stranger one time published the entire publication was one of their local writers book segments. And they ran it through every column. It was so cool. They broke the form, and um, you know, we do poetry, we'll do a poetry issue. And I think that's it's important. I mean, it's also hearkening back to a lot of the writers come from creative lit backgrounds, and it's a diverse group of writers, so it's a little different. Um, but yeah, it's it's awesome.

SPEAKER_03 16:24

People think of newspapers as being so dry, but I I feel the opposite. I feel like there's just so much in there, and they're and the people who make them are so creative. Um, it's really fun. You know, a student publication like The Broadside or an altweekly like The Source, it's so cool when the people who create it are allowed some of that freedom to make it into something.

SPEAKER_00 16:46

Yeah, these these days I find um they hold themselves back. Like the format used to be much wilder than it is now. And I and when these things get proposed, sometimes in editorial meetings, they'll propose these things and they'll think it's the craziest idea. And I'm like, yeah, you can obviously you can do that. You can, you know, you can use first person, you can tell your story, you can do, and they're like, oh wow, yeah, you know.

SPEAKER_03 17:11

So yeah, it is it is interesting. I mean, I feel like when I was when I was a young journalist, I'm 45 now, so it's been a while, but when I was first starting out, um, it was really hard to get anybody to approve a first person story. And I and I also I've I've joked with people about this. It was also something that young journalists wanted to write all the time. And my students never pitch first person stories. It's funny. It used to be like a rite of passage. You would just push and push and push, and eventually an editor would say, Fine, he can do it, you know. Um, I I remember my first first person story.

SPEAKER_00 17:51

Well, it's it's it's the allure of what you can't do, like you're not allowed to do that. It's like someday I'm gonna write first person in the paper, you know. Um and but you do get to do a little more creatively when that happens. And but I think that, you know, one of the reasons is because of from the editor side, you you're horrified when you're getting all of these first person articles given to you like, um, no, nobody wants to read about your fishing experiences. What was there news around this?

SPEAKER_03 18:22

Right, right. And it is, it is still a little bit of a battle. I mean, I think there's oh, you know, every generation is gonna have fight some of the same, gonna have some of the same struggles, but I feel like it is it is one thing that I do feel like with certain students, I struggle to kind of get that newsworthiness across to them. It doesn't matter what you're writing for, even a magazine or something semi-literary. There needs to be a hook for your story.

SPEAKER_00 18:48

Well, as much as we're joking about first person, how cool that is, I mean, it's a much lower on the totem than writing like a serious investigative news speech, which they have to definitely put in the time to learn learn the basics of. And um, yeah, and being a uh night fellow, uh you went through the you went through the rigors of it.

SPEAKER_03 19:10

Yeah, one of the things that's been really cool about and you went to that after the bulletin? Yeah, so I I was actually working for the bulletin when I applied for the fellowship and I and I got it. And so I took a year-long leave of absence from the bulletin and and went to Michigan. And what's really cool about that program is it brings together, you know, 12 to 15 journalists from all over the world to spend a year there. Um you have twice-weekly seminars. The program actually owns a house on the Michigan campus where you can just gather and cook dinners and things like that. Um but it's really a year free from deadlines to kind of explore your interests. And my book sort of grew out of that. But what's really lasted from that experience is my relationships with the other fellows, um, many of whom have been guest speakers to my classes at CSCC, which has been really fun. Um, I mean, I I was with some just incredible, inspiring journalists in that program. Um, Elena Melashina, who's a reporter, she was a reporter for the Novaya Gazetta in Russia, um, in Moscow. It's it was their only free press newspaper left until um, you know, Putin shut that down also in I don't remember now, 2022, something like that. Um she spoke to my CFCC class one time. Yeah, she stayed up till two or three in the morning so she could zoom live with our class and answer their questions and talk about what it's like writing about you know a country that doesn't have the same um First Amendment protections that we have here in the United States. Um for now, yeah. I think about her talk to my class so often she was actually um really brutally assaulted a couple months after she spoke with us. Um she had all of her fingers broken, she had acid poured on her face. And this was not the first time she'd been attacked. She'd broken some really big stories about um gay men being tortured in Chechnya and just a lot of big, big stories that the powers that be over there do not want uncovered. Um and she's she's paid a very serious personal price for it. Um yeah, I think about her a lot. I think about she she said some things to the class that were scary but kind of prescient about what's happening in our country now. Um yeah, but there were and there were other, you know, people from all over the world doing really incredible work in journalism. It was really inspiring to get to know them and become friends with them. And and my COCC students benefit from that. That's great. Yeah. They they've they've helped me out a lot.

SPEAKER_00 21:51

Uh we saw I saw a picture of you from your book shotgun vest. What call in the mild. Call of the mild, yeah. That's impressive too. It took a swerve and uh Yeah, it was something that I And it's on it's uh it's nonfiction.

SPEAKER_03 22:08

It's nonfiction, it's part journalism, it's part journalism.

SPEAKER_00 22:11

Was you in the vest?

SPEAKER_03 22:12

That was me. My husband took that picture way before the book was a was a thing. Um yeah, I started I moved here in 2004 and I started learning to hunt in 2006. I took a hunter safety class. Um, it took me like a I I got interested in it. I kept meeting all these people who were hunters here. I mean, I grew up in Washington, DC. This was not something that I was familiar with. Um, but I kept meeting all these people who hunted and they were not what I'd expected. They were, you know, really passionate about the animals that they hunted in a way that I was that really surprised me. Um they thought about you know what they ate and where it came from. The local movement was kind of gaining steam at that time, you know, Michael Collin was getting really big. And so it got interesting to me. And the first barrier that I ran into is I couldn't figure out how somebody learns to hunt. If your dad doesn't take you when you're a kid, how do you do it? And you're a woman, and you're a woman, and you're in your two.

SPEAKER_00 23:14

You're not gonna grab your six-pack of paps and head out to free stand with it.

SPEAKER_03 23:18

I am not going to. No. So I had to kind of figure out well, how do I learn to do this? And eventually a friend told me, you should take hunter safety. That was the first thing that I did when I was 11 or 12 or something. And so I, you know, I interviewed people from ODFW all the time. So I looked it up and or called and talked to somebody, and they said, Oh, well, you just missed the adult class, but we have this they said all ages hunter safety class starting next week in Culver. You could sign up for that. And so I joined, and um, I was 26 at the time, and they were they divided us into people who are under 11 and people who are over 11 on the first day of class. And I was in the over 11 class, and um, and it was really, it was really, it was a really important experience for me. Yeah. Um, you know, I grew up really scared of guns. I didn't have have guns growing up, I didn't shoot guns. Um, and the idea of a kid with a gun was was the worst, the worst case scenario. And so to be in this classroom setting that really emphasized safety, we had incredible instructors um with these kids was just this really, really great experience for me. Um and I would come home every night and I would tell my um then boyfriend, now husband, about it. And um, you know, I was a writer, so I started writing it down and I thought I'm gonna write an essay about this someday. It was funny. It was funny because I was the only adult and and I had so much admiration for those kids. Kids are so good at doing something new and being bad at something. And even though I was only 26, I had kind of lost that a little bit. Like I was used to being pretty good at the things that I did. And so it was really, um, I don't know, it was just You were bad at it. I was really bad at it. I was bad at being bad at something, and I was really bad at hunting, and it was it was a it was a great learning experience though. And I tried a number of times to write about it and I couldn't like I couldn't write a contained essay because I couldn't explain why the hell I was learning to hunt in the first place. And yeah, eventually, you know, it just it I realized, oh, this is a book. It's not an essay, it's a book. So um yeah, and then um six years later, I I finished it and yeah, found a publisher, an agent, and a publisher. And is it still available?

SPEAKER_00 25:49

Can I find it if I it is still available?

SPEAKER_03 25:51

I know they still have it at the library, at the Deschutes Library.

SPEAKER_00 25:54

Okay.

SPEAKER_03 25:55

If you want to know more about Lily, yeah, you'll know you'll learn more than you ever wanted to know. Because it is a memoir too. It's it's personal also. Um, you know, six years is a long, a long time in anybody's life, and a lot happened to me during that time. Um, I had people really close to me die, and a lot of the book was about, you know, life and death and hunting you're taking somebody's life. And um yeah, it was a it it's it's wide-ranging kind of in exploration of hunting. That's great in my experience.

SPEAKER_00 26:29

Well, and The Guardian picked it up. I mean, or not The Guardian, the uh San Francisco Chronicle, which is not a conservative publication.

SPEAKER_03 26:37

No, it's not. It was it was fun to see people. Um I think there was a a lot of news media was interested in the book and the idea of somebody who wasn't a stereotypical hunter taking it up and kind of finding value in it. Um hunting's been on the decline for a really long time in the United States, and we also have a lot of we have a wildlife system in the United States that's largely funded by hunters. So we have kind of this weird situation where a lot of the environmentalists who, you know, who care a lot about wildlife aren't actually the ones funding conservation in the United States, it's the hunters who's the hunters, sure. And so this disconnect between what the modern conservation movement looks like and who's funding it is kind of a big big deal that hasn't really been reconciled.

SPEAKER_00 27:30

I've been fascinated by organizations like Ducks Unlimited, who hunt ducks, but also then are the ones who are preserving more duck habitat than any other environmental group. And um yeah, it goes to what you're speaking on. It's yeah, super interesting.

SPEAKER_03 27:42

Yeah, I mean, all of all wildlife issues in a way kind of come back to habitat. And so um, you know, we live in a place that's growing, real the population's growing really fast. There's new neighborhoods, new roads. Um, a lot of the people who are moving here are people moving from cities, they don't want people shooting guns right outside their house or where they're recreating necessarily, and so there's more kind of um land use conflicts related to hunting, and hunters have you know less and less access to areas. So when a group like you know, Ducks Unlimited can preserve land and allow hunting access, it's kind of it's a win for well, the new school year is right around the corner.

SPEAKER_00 28:26

By the time we publish this, I think you will be one day away from uh starting your new semester. What are you uh what are you excited about for this year?

SPEAKER_03 28:36

I have a couple things I'm really excited about for this year. Um, one is just I mentioned earlier the students that I had last year just were just a true dream team. I mean, this is kind of the group of students that I hoped for when I first took the job and I I found them last year, and a lot of them are coming back. So I just was really impressed by what they were able to do last year. They did some really serious investigative journalism for the broadside. They did um, they just worked really well together as a team, and I'm just excited to see what they can do with another year together. Um, and then we have some new ventures happening at COCC too. We have a new multimedia journalism course that we've never offered before. I'm excited to see kind of what that sparks in students and what they make. Um, and then we also have a new partnership with uh nonprofit called For Journalism or the Fund for Oregon Rural Journalism. They have a high school program for students, you know, there's only one high school in the area that still has a student newspaper.

SPEAKER_01 29:41

Right.

SPEAKER_03 29:41

Um so most high school students don't have access to anything like that. Forge, this nonprofit, has created a paid internship for high school students who want to learn about journalism and create a regional online publication. Um, it's called the Future Journalists of America, and the publication that they create is called The Obsidian. And COCC is gonna start working with those students too. So they're gonna spend about half of their internship time at COCC. Um, and I'm just excited about that, you know, more energy, more young people learning journalism and more funding, which is good. More funding. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think that there are, you know, there are journalism jobs in Central Oregon, and we need people to do them. And so um getting more young people excited and giving them the foundational skills to become journalists is gonna benefit all of us.

SPEAKER_00 30:32

Yeah, Forge is interesting because they're part of that new wave of nonprofit supported funding for journalism, and you can see it now entering into the stuff that you're doing at COCC to provide these guys some pathway in. So it goes back to what we were talking about at the beginning. It's all change. Yeah. You know, it just it's now you've got to get those dollars from somewhere else besides subscriptions.

SPEAKER_03 30:56

Yeah, there are different opportunities. One of my students at COCC actually was accepted this summer into the New York Times Corps, which is um one of their relatively new programs. Yeah, it's 20 students across the country, and one of them is a COCC student. Um, but he's gonna basically have New York Times journalists mentoring him throughout the rest of his college education, um, which is really cool for him personally, but I think it's gonna be really cool for the broadside and for other COCC students too, because it's, you know, all of it's such a group, a group effort that it's gonna be really neat to see him learning from all these different, all these other outlets, and then being able to share that with students at COCC.

unknown 31:38

Great.

SPEAKER_00 31:39

Well, we're at the end of our time for uh this. Uh anything that you want to touch on that we did not, and I know it's been we've been all over the place.

SPEAKER_03 31:48

No, this is just great. It's it's cool that there's this podcast here, and it's just like one more outlet for local local news and the community's interests. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 31:58

Well, I wanted to get you on. You're doing such good stuff up at COCC. And uh I know people still know your name from the bulletin and they're gonna want to know where Lily went. And you know where it's still here. Still doing it. Well, this has been the Ben Don't Break Podcast. If you liked what you heard, go on the Bensource.com, become a member, and support cool things like this, and we will continue to hopefully work with COCC and uh and Lily and inspiring journalists. Thanks for coming on.

SPEAKER_03 32:31

Thanks for having me.

SPEAKER_00 32:33

You've been listening to the Ben Don't Break Podcast, powered by the Source Weekly. To read, hear, and see more of what we do, go to BensOce.com