My first newspaper job was selling classified ads over the phone for The Valley Times in Beaverton, Oregon, the summer after my freshman year in college. I’d started writing for my college paper and was thrilled to have a job – any job – in the newspaper business, even if it meant inputting ads for garage sales and used cars at a small suburban weekly.

My second newspaper job was at another community newspaper publisher, this one a chain of Los Angeles neighborhood weeklies that seemed to specialize in grocery store ads – at least that’s how it felt to me, as one of the paste up artists putting the ads together.

Those stints gave me an appreciation for community papers, one I was happy to revisit when I reported on the health of small daily and weekly newspapers here in Oregon for a story in the February 2009 issue of Oregon Business magazine. My conclusion: although times are tough for newspapers of all sizes, small papers are in a better position to survive the current economic downturn and changes in the newspaper industry than the big metro dailies.

You can read the entire story here: The Smalltown News.

I love the first days of the month. It means I’ve closed the books on whatever I billed in the previous 30 days and I’m starting all over again. This month it also means the start of my blogathon, A Post a Day in the Month of May, which is already generating a lot of buzz.

Usually the first of the month also means I have some new stories out in various magazines and Websites.

This month, I’ve got a feature story in Oregon Business magazine about local manufacturers who’ve chosen not to move their factories offshore. It’s called “Made in Oregon” and you can read it here.

I also wrote a piece for IncTechnology.com about cell phone service price wars. Did you know you can buy all-you-can-talk service for $99 from all the major cell carriers? Read more here.

IncTechnology.com is also running a slide show I wrote called “No More Paper,” that explains how small businesses can cut down on the amount of office paper they use. I’ve written a couple slide shows for IncTechnology.com. Think of them as short stories told in 50-word increments.

You’ll think twice before sending a dirty joke to a co-worker after reading this story I wrote about dumb things that can get you fired, for a Website called YourSecurityResource.com.

Hood River, Oregon, is a special place. People visit because of the world-class windsurfing, apple and pear orchards, B&Bs and micro-brewed beer. It’s a picturesque town nestled on the banks of the Columbia River, with an old-fashioned downtown that’s home to lots of new coffee shops, restaurants and boutiques. Skiing on Mt. Hood is only a half-hour’s drive away. What outsiders might not know is that a cluster of high-tech companies has also taken root in the area, a trend started in the 1990s when a handful of windsurfing enthusiasts took the same composite materials their boards were made of and used them to design other things, most notably small unmanned military airplanes. Today, the Gorge tech cluster has helped the historically poor area lower unemployment and improve the local economy. You can read more about in my story on Hood River’s booming tech business in“The Gorge Effect,” in the January 2008 issue of Oregon Business magazine.