• Eugene Weekly’s endorsements for the November election will be offered in next week’s paper, the same time that ballots are mailed out to you important voters. If you really do believe in democracy, you had better vote, vote, vote. Imma let you finish, Kanye, but Taylor Swift had one of the best voter registration drives of all time. Thanks to Swift’s Instagram post sending her 112 million followers to Vote.org to register, Lane County was one of the areas seeing an overnight spike in voter registration according to Lane County Elections. See our story at eugeneweekly.com and be sure to register to vote by 11:59 pm Oct. 16.
• Word reached us just before press time that former Register-Guard reporter Serena Markstrom Nugent has won her court appeal against the RG. Markstrom, a popular entertainment writer, was fired from the paper in 2014 after becoming pregnant. In 2015 she filed a $525,000 discrimination lawsuit. In 2016 Lane County Circuit Court Judge Josephine Mooney dismissed the case; the judge’s decision has now been overturned and sent back to the lower court. Look for more online at eugeneweekly.com.
• Eugene is a city of palaces where we can go and watch super athletes compete. But we need more places where ordinary athletes, especially kids, can play instead of watch. That’s what is driving Bev Smith, director of Kidsports, and others on the Civic Alliance board (including EW co-owner Art Johnson) to raise millions for the new Civic Park where historic Civic Stadium once stood. Hundreds of Eugeneans brought shovels on Sunday afternoon, Oct. 7, to break ground on the 10-acre site near where Civic Stadium once stood. It was a great community event that should help raise the rest of the financing needed to finish the park.
• Julie Fahey’s Oct. 5 appearance before the City Club of Eugene reminded us once again how lucky we are to have politicians like her representing us in Oregon’s Legislature. A Democrat, she’s running against Republican Rich Cunningham in House District 14. He’s serving his second four-year term on the Bethel school board and has a history of public service, but she is far ahead in understanding state issues. Once again, the League of Women Voters of Lane County and the City Club of Eugene are doing a fine job offering forums of opposing candidates before the November election. They take place Fridays at noon in the Baker Center downtown, and you can listen at 6:30 pm Mondays on KLCC.
• The Register-Guard on Sunday, Oct. 7, apologized to readers for an online advertisement that some found pornographic. A photo of five naked girls by controversial photographer Jock Sturges was being listed by an established art auction house in Texas. An image of the photo popped up at the top of the RG website one afternoon when we were checking the news here at EW. RG Publisher Shanna Cannon deflected blame when we alerted her, suggesting that EW’s computers were infected by a virus. Ultimately, though, she agreed the photo came from an online ad supplier with which the paper has now cut ties. The RG laid it all out and apologized in an Oct. 5 opinion column in which EW got demoted from newspaper (see our blog about the ad faux pas) to “a reader.” The bigger problem, of course, is newspapers outsourcing their ad business to a digital swamp run by algorithms.