Jamie Hale is the outdoors and travel reporter for The Oregonian/OregonLive. He spends his time traveling Oregon and the Pacific Northwest to help guide travelers to the region’s best trails, small towns and roadside attractions. Jamie co-hosts the Peak Northwest podcast and co-hosts the Peak Northwest video series. His passion is in finding the ways we connect with each other and with the natural world around us. He started covering travel in 2016, after two years on the events beat in Portland. He graduated with a journalism degree from the University of Maryland in 2010, and worked at newspapers in Idaho, New Mexico and Pennsylvania before returning home to Oregon.
What appeals to you about your beat?
What’s not to love? It’s sort of a dream job. I feel like there are not a lot of outdoor and travel reporting opportunities in journalism these days.
I mean, I love the outdoors. I love being outside and talking to people about why they love being outside. So that’s a really nice aspect about it. It’s not something I’ve ever really aspired to do exactly. It’s something that I just backed into early in my time at the Oregonian.
I kind of lucked out, but what I think appeals to me is that it’s a features writing position, writing ostensibly with a lot of opportunities for nude writing as well. So it’s a good balance where tomorrow I’m gonna go out to Cannon Beach to eat some fish and chips for a story, but last week I was sitting in a federal courthouse writing about this complicated situation at Atlanta Falls. And in between then, I was doing some records requests at Crater Lake National Park, so there’s a lot of variety there, and that really appeals to me.
How do you find your ideas for the pieces that you write?
Oh gosh. People ask me that all the time, and It’s weirdly hard to say, but I never tend to remember. Sometimes ideas come up while I’m in the shower. Sometimes I’m sitting at my desk, and I’m like, on Google Maps, and I’m just looking around. Sometimes I’m on social media. Sometimes someone mentions something to me. It’s rare that an editor suggests something unless it’s like a news piece and it’s rare that I solicit ideas from the general public. But every other method of figuring out a story is pretty much fair game for me.
What has been your favorite piece that you’ve done so far?
That’s a tough one. I guess I’ll have some recency bias here. I did a story last year about the trail of the Rogue River Trail of Tears, which is a piece that was exploring the history of some intergenerational trauma among a couple of the indigenous tribes here, the Warm Springs and Grand Ron Tribes, and connecting that to the hopeful present. It was a really interesting challenge, not only in the interviewing process of talking to people about, like, tell me these horrible things that your grandparents and your great grandparents went through. But challenging narratives that I think a lot of Oregonians hold about how this land was occupied by people in the 19th century, but then like trying to weave that historical narrative into this sort of present-day story. And trying to sort of take a non-linear approach to that storytelling, that was a challenge that I found really interesting and that I really enjoyed as well.
What is your biggest piece of advice for young journalists?
Developing the skill to write clean copy quickly is vital. Making an editor’s job easy will always earn you a friend at a paper. Especially these days when people are so understaffed, just being confident with the writing of it.
I know it’s hard out there; there aren’t a lot of jobs, so trying to just find somewhere where you can do something is helpful. Having some flexibility in where you might go and what you might do. Being willing to go to small towns and do reporting in small towns is crucial, and not everyone has the privilege to be able to pick up and move across the country.
I did so much interesting work and learned so much just being in these small towns and, and learning how people work, how government works, learning about corruption, how to find public records, how the business works, and learning how to spot a corrupt publisher when you see one. These are all vital experiences in my life. So I think the willingness to go into these small towns that desperately need journalism, if these jobs still exist, is a really, really great way to get your feet wet in this industry.
How does social media impact your job day to day, and how do you use it?
Oh boy. It’s changing so much, isn’t it? As of just like four or five years ago, Twitter was constant, and that was where there was such a good source of information. And now I maintain an account on Twitter, but I don’t use it at all. I’ve sort of moved over to Blue Sky, and that’s a place where it’s not the same, it has not many people on it. The government agencies aren’t on it, but that’s a place where I can sort of keep tabs on what’s going on and what other outlets are reporting on. That’s the main way we do it now.
But otherwise, it’s more about how I am crafting my work to be presented on social media. We’re at a point now when we’re trying to craft headlines specifically. That work for search, and headlines that work for social media, and trying to see what people will engage with and what they won’t. It’s a little silly sometimes to play the game.
We’re at a stage when those page views are vital to our industry. So, thinking about what will people on social media stop at and click on, and how do we help get our news out there to as many people as possible?
Emma Wright-Cloutier 
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