There were moments on Election Day when Rachel Smolkin felt like she was right back at her old job. “I felt a little twitchy all day, like I should be up in the control room,” she says. “It was different.” Smolkin recently left CNN, where for the last decade she helped drive the national conversation as head of digital news. In September she started as CEO of Oregon Public Broadcasting, a nonprofit regional media company whose soaring fortunes have contrasted with the decline of local newspapers and other traditional information sources in the Pacific Northwest. A childhood fan of “Sesame Street” and “The Electric Company,” Smolkin, 53, tells Oregon Business she was drawn to OPB due to its financial health and public mission, a mission that’s long involved serving areas that lie beyond the boundaries of major media markets. Only now those parts of Oregon are rapidly expanding and have come to include some of the state’s marquee locales: Eugene, Bend, Ashland, Medford, Klamath Falls. After two months on the job, her imprint was already visible to those who knew where to look. For one, OPB’s televised election coverage last year employed the lower-screen news crawl — a feature more commonly associated with cable news than public broadcasting — to much fuller effect. OPB also now holds an all-staff meeting each morning, during which department heads share what their teams are working on. It’s another element she brought over from her old job, but Smolkin thinks the meeting underscores what public broadcasting is all about. “I love the richness that OPB offers,” she says. “We have a very strong news department, and we also have strong coverage in arts, culture and history, and we’ve got some really good graphics and data work. People need that mix.” OPB has come a long way since 1922, when a physics instructor at what’s now Oregon State University built a transmitter to teach students about radio frequencies. Following a successful test broadcast featuring the Corvallis High School band, the instructor, Jacob Jordan, applied for a broadcast license. The station that would gradually morph into OPB began broadcasting in January of the following year. The operation Smolkin inherits is a sprawling modern media company that produces popular radio (294,000 weekly listeners) and TV (447,000 weekly viewers) programming, and maintains the largest newsroom in the Former CNN executive Rachel Smolkin stepped into the CEO role at Oregon Public Broadcasting last fall. Here’s what she wants to do. BY GARRETT ANDREWS | PHOTOS BY JASON E. KAPLAN REPORTING FOR DUTY OPD’s new CEO Rachel Smolkin 32
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