I Had a Dream Journalism Job. Here's Why I Quit.

The rot that hollowed out trust in corporate media finally reached OPB. I had to go.

“Truth/Optics,” by Joe Preston

The year was 2013 and the collapse of newspapers was apparent to anyone with eyes. Or at least to me, who had just seen their boss unceremoniously hauled out of his office by his soon-to-be corporate replacement.

I was city editor at The World, a newspaper in the coastal town of Coos Bay, Oregon, where I was paid $32,000 a year to edit reporters, assign stories, design pages, write the occasional op-ed, field calls from readers and prioritize the coverage appearing in the paper’s daily news section. My new boss offered me a raise to $36,000 to oversee the full paper and help supervise two weekly publications in nearby communities. I wanted out. Thankfully, I got the call I’d been waiting for: I’d landed a job at Oregon Public Broadcasting, the largest public media organization in the state.

Public media stood apart from what I was used to in print journalism. Rather than relying heavily upon classifieds and advertisers, OPB leans on audience trust as its business core. Paid membership by people in the community, with some governmental support, kept the lights on. And those members take pride in that trust, slapping bumper stickers on their cars and carrying OPB coffee mugs.

When I moved to Portland to start at OPB in 2013 on a grant to build community journalism, I did not initially understand why so many people would donate to the operation. OPB was known for sweeping television programs that showed off Oregon’s natural beauty, but the news team wasn’t much larger than what I had just left in Coos Bay. They didn’t break news often, focusing instead on follow-up stories to the previous day’s headlines in The Oregonian.

My role at OPB was to support small, financially-collapsing newspapers across the state that could no longer afford to fill their pages with regional and local stories. OPB wanted to lead with a new type of journalism – one that prioritized collaboration over competition. It was a positive vision of media that saw an opportunity to better inform Oregonians and rebuild news by sharing OPB’s ample resources with other outlets. That vision resonated with members and donors, and soon OPB hired more reporters to cover the state.

OPB became more serious about original news coverage out of a duty to Oregonians. By covering more stories, we could share more regional coverage with our partners. In turn, more people in our state would get news relevant to their lives instead of more national wire services.

By the time armed militants took over the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in 2016, there was new vigor in the small but growing newsroom. Our reporters stationed at the refuge every day of the 41-day occupation. While national reporters ate up the oppressed cowboy narrative put forth by the occupiers, OPB reporters knew Oregon and didn’t soft pedal what was happening. We revealed how the occupiers destroyed tribal burial sites to make garbage pits and the ways the government’s failure to prosecute the Bundys in 2014, after an armed confrontation on their property in Nevada, led directly to the Oregon occupation. Our reporters worked with other Oregon journalists to produce podcasts, talk shows and documentaries revealing the truth of what happened in remote Harney County.

That was a turning point for OPB and for me. The newsroom grew year-after-year as the organization’s leaders – and inspired donors – invested millions of dollars into journalism that sought to hold power to account without fear or favor. Former Oregonian reporter Anna Griffin joined OPB at that time to lead the newsroom, pushing all of us to live up to the ideals of what journalism is supposed to be: fair, accurate and always seeking accountability.

For the next decade, I helped grow the reputation of OPB’s newsroom by producing and reporting a series of hit podcasts, primarily with my reporting partner, Leah Sottile. I edited and mentored reporters as they strove to uncover societal ills in our jails and the looming drought coming for us all. My work sent a man to prison for a murder he nearly got away with. It uncovered the physical, psychological and constitutional abuses inflicted on regular Oregonians by federal and local police officers during protests in 2020. I effectively cut the legs out from under an AI slop-house positioning itself as a local newspaper so it could profit off the reputations of real journalists.

Contrary to the early part of my career in newspapers, I felt optimistic at OPB. We were changing the state of Oregon for the better. I bought a house. I planned to retire from public media someday, having served my community through my journalism.

I was foolishly comfortable.

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In the fall of 2024, OPB’s board hired Rachel Smolkin away from CNN following the retirement of longtime CEO Steve Bass. She came from a strong journalism background, which seemed promising. She was someone who ascended to the heights of a nationally-known outlet. But bringing on a CEO from a corporate journalism background into public media carried risk. I, like many Americans, have often worried about the ways big business shapes the reporting that happens – or doesn’t happen – at corporate media outlets. That’s a concern I never had to wonder about at OPB.

For a long time, I simply shook my head at what I saw happening broadly in media. Sure, the national outlets were debasing themselves in new and surprising ways seemingly daily, but I believed local journalism could be different. OPB had a mission to cover the news in a way that helped society — immune to the mistakes of the wider industry.

I knew OPB was changing when Smolkin sat in front of a room of journalists and told us she saw herself as our new “editor in chief.” I felt immediately on edge about the remark. A CEO’s job in public media is to raise money and court donors, not to dictate news coverage. (Around a year later while speaking to a roomful of newsroom leaders, Smolkin would deny she said this; I’ve confirmed her “editor in chief” comment through a recording of the meeting.)

The concept of an editorial firewall is sacred to journalists: The moneymaking side of media must stay the hell out of the newsroom so the work isn’t tainted. People who have power, once allowed input on an editorial process, will seek to shape it in their favor. In all of my time at OPB, until Smolkin’s arrival, this was never an issue. The CEO and the board never involved themselves in our journalism, as far as I know.

This premise essentially equates to church and state. To belabor this metaphor, Smolkin is the Pope, and she soon made it clear OPB was now her Vatican. Incursions from the business side began to arise.

In that first year of Smolkin’s management, here’s what her serving as “editor in chief” looked like: story pitches from OPB board members being directed to reporters, editors being told staff did not understand rural Oregon after Smolkin toured the region for the first time to meet with powerbrokers there (many OPB staff, including me, grew up and worked in rural areas for years before coming to Portland), calls on weekends to chase inconsequential stories because another news outlet had published, and board member critiques of coverage filtering down to editorial leaders.

A single event could potentially be excused as new leaders finding their feet at a complex news organization. But after enough times, I couldn’t shake the truth.

The rot that hollowed out trust in corporate media finally reached OPB.

One doesn’t need to look far to find evidence of the ethical decay at news organizations. National media is filled with hucksters who shout about returning journalism to the highest standards while making decisions that betray those honey-dripped words – see Bari Weiss and her handling of CBS. This pandering, “both sides” journalism has left trust in media institutions at an all time low, according to a recent Gallup poll.

My faith in OPB’s ability to deliver on its mission shattered this fall when they informed Sottile and me that the organization would be ending our investigative podcast, Hush. In two seasons, the show had been a massive success by all measures – it helped free a wrongly-accused man who spent 17 years on Oregon’s death row, and it highlighted the cascading bureaucratic failures that derailed the death investigation of a young woman in rural Oregon. Our first season won a National Headliner award and was downloaded hundreds of thousands of times. The series embodied the highest goals of local journalism, bringing voice to the voiceless through rigorous reporting and demanding powerful people answer for their actions. Sottile and I poured thousands of hours into each season. Hush is journalism I’m incredibly proud of.

And yet, OPB canceled the show for no clear reason. When I asked Chief Content Officer Jason Potts, who was hired under Smolkin, if he had even listened to the show before canceling it, he told me no. When I inquired further about his reasons for ending the project, I only received vague replies about how it did not fit organizational priorities.

Other shows, such as OPB’s food program Superabundant would face similarly vague demises – described as a “pause,” presumably to soften the blow that was ending years of people’s hard work.

Soon, Smolkin would require staff to pivot away from the projects they cultivated out of years of reporting in Oregon to work on her own brainchild: making short-form videos about “creators” in the state. The dreaded “pivot to video” that plagued newspapers in the early days of the internet had reached public media, by my estimation.

All things old are new again.

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I do not claim to know the future of news media. I don’t know what it should look like in our social media-soaked era, our AI era. What I do know is that no technology has changed the core principles of this work: find facts, maintain your ethics at all costs and hold the rich and powerful accountable.

By last December, I had given up my hope that all of this change was temporary at OPB. My good job was not good anymore. My weeks were now spent in meetings doing busywork driven by senior leaders. Much of the rest of my time I spent on trying to protect reporters and editors from orders by Smolkin and Potts to chase stories The Oregonian reported so we could “compete” with them. It felt as if everything I had spent a decade trying to build – the collaborative push to elevate the quality of journalism in Oregon – was unraveled overnight by a corporate news mentality, by people who appeared to me more concerned about optics and competition than speaking truth to power.

Over the past year, I have seen people with decades of experience at OPB leave one after another. This included Griffin, who now works at The New York Times. TV producers who gave their careers to OPB are gone. Marketing, fundraising, finance – almost every department at OPB has seen people head for the doors under this new leadership team. Of course, departure emails have been filled with vague reasons to end long careers: new professional opportunities, early retirements, spending more time with family. I admit, even mine was vague because it just felt easier to leave than to fight anymore. Countless people have asked me if I was forced out. I was not.

But the OPB on your coffee mug, or on your window sticker, might not be the exact place you think it is. It isn’t a place I understand anymore, though many excellent journalists still work there. It is led by people in glass offices who make offensively large salaries¹ while reporters barely make a livable wage. Some journalists work an extra job to make up for what OPB doesn’t pay them.

A new job posting punctuated my final day in the office. It advertised for another non-journalism role, a director of operations who could make up to $140,000 a year, far exceeding all but one newsroom salary. A $200,000 vice-president of marketing soon followed, further swelling the top ranks at OPB.

To me, money from the public should be focused on making journalism, not padding executive salaries. For the past year and a half, the reporters, hosts and producers you hear on the radio and read online at OPB have bargained for a first union contract. Their goal is to cement the vision of a media outlet that values journalism and the people who make it. As of this writing, an agreement still hasn’t been reached.

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As I enter 2026, I feel hopeful about the future of journalism, despite the personally challenging year I’m leaving behind.

In his essay, “Best ways to support journalism in 2025,” former LA Times national correspondent and current strong press advocate Matt Pearce frames the problem I faced at OPB quite simply: “Journalism is a captured industry.” Pearce was referring to the corrosive effects of Big Tech, but I would extend that analysis to include corporate leaders who are wealthy, removed from the front lines of journalism and who pay more attention to other moneyed, powerful people than they do their own reporters².

Westerners deserve more high quality journalism in 2026, not less. This is why I have joined with Sottile to form The Western Edge. Fearless reporting won’t be up for debate or compromise at The Western Edge, it will be the marching order. It will be a continuation of the ethos we established with Hush, even if the leaders at OPB didn’t see the value in that.

If you believe, like I do, that quality journalism comes from reporters and not from board rooms, I hope you’ll subscribe to The Western Edge. Nearly every dollar we make will go into actual reporting. That’s a promise that I guarantee few media organizations can make.

1. OPB’s senior leaders pulled in just shy of $3 million in pay and other compensation in 2024, the last year the nonprofit’s 990 tax forms are available to the public. That pre-date’s Smolkin’s tenure, which has seen several additions to the executive staff as well as promotions among their ranks.

2. The Washington Post might come to mind for you.