User:Barney Lerten

The account of this former contributor was not re-activated after the server upgrade of March 2022.

I started in journalism very young (the Room 210 Tooter), and have been a professional journalist for 30 years (graduated from Pacific U. in Forest Grove, Ore. in 1977) as of this spring, the first 14 years with United Press International in San Francisco and Portland, then nine years with The Bulletin, the daily here in Bend, Oregon.

I left that in early 2000 to write local news full-time for the Web with a site called Bend.com, which also led to a print publication, The Bugle. After five wild, fun years, the funds ran out, so I frantically networked and landed back in TV news (which I last did at Adams High School in Portland), at KTVZ (NewsChannel 21), the NBC affiliate here in the fastest-growing county in Oregon (and 34th of all counties in the U.S. for 2005-06). I was assistant news director for a couple of years, moving now into Digital Content Director as we relaunch http://www.ktvz.com in coming months.

I was a beta tester for America Online (all who remember GeoWorks sound a cheer!) – wish I’d been a beta shareholder. Have been online for 20-plus years, from 300-baud modems on, and … well, a lot’s happened since.

I have a Website, http://releaseme.squarespace.com where, once in a great while, I wax poetic about how the Net means a new brand of PR – truly PUBLIC relations – that anyone (individual, group or company) can use to communicate with large audiences, not needing to go through the old mass media, and which has large, untapped potential in that regard.