Starting Sunday, January 4, 2015 …

Published in

OREGON TALE

3 min readJan 1, 2015

Alt reporter Chris Faraone will publish a weekly series on Medium.com investigating militarized evictions in Southwest Oregon.

Eight months ago, Boston-based journalist Chris Faraone had never heard of Josephine County. He had only been to Oregon once before, and that was to cover protests in Portland, four hours north of Josephine, for his 2012 book on the Occupy Wall Street movement. But since learning early last year that SWAT teams have evicted families near the Josephine County seat of Grants Pass, Faraone has spent hundreds of hours studying the fallout from Oregon’s eroding timber economy, as well as the mad dash for private forests rich with harvestable trees and minerals.

Beginning this Sunday and continuing every week for the next several months, Faraone will publish his resulting work and research as installments in a series titled “Oregon Tale,” to run primarily on Medium.com (and occasionally on partner sites as well). He has assembled a small team to assist with the multimedia project, and will soon be returning to Grants Pass for follow-up recon and interviews. The story is ongoing, and features investigative reporting on mining, logging, and foreclosures in the Pacific Northwest, as well as accounts of Faraone’s time on the ground examining Josephine’s peculiar political landscape.

Faraone is available for interviews, and is actively engaging collaborations with other media outlets, traditional or otherwise. WTP is publishing this project in the belief that immediate attention should be given to these issues, and in the hope that publicity will generate both leads and interest as the audience grows from week to week.

Chris Faraone is a former Boston Phoenix staff writer and the current features editor of DigBoston, the leading alternative news outlet in New England. He is also the founder and publisher of WTP Books, on which he has released four projects including 99 Nights with the 99 Percent, his critically applauded travelogue on the Occupy Wall Street movement. Faraone has contributed long-form features to publications including Esquire, Vocativ, Columbia Journalism Review, and BuzzFeed, and has received multiple awards for his reporting from the Association of Alternative Newsmedia (AAN) and the New England Newspaper & Press Association (NENPA).