Rieder: Reporter who took down Oregon's governor

Rem Rieder | USA TODAY

If Nigel Jaquiss had stayed in the oil trading business or pulled off the transition to novelist, John Kitzhaber might still be governor of Oregon.

Unfortunately for Kitzhaber, Jaquiss made a mid-career switch to journalism. Jaquiss' reporting in the alternative weekly Willamette Week on Kitzhaber's ethical blinders regarding his fiancée triggered the governor's resignation last Friday; successor Kate Brown was sworn in Wednesday.

That Jaquiss was the reporter who brought down the governor is hardly a surprise. He won a Pulitzer Prize in 2005 for reporting that former Oregon governor and ex-Cabinet official Neil Goldschmidt, a revered figure in the state, had had a long-term sexual relationship with a teenage babysitter.

Then in 2009, Jaquiss disclosed that then-Portland Mayor Sam Adams had had a sexual relationship with a teenage legislative intern.

Jaquiss, 52, is fueled by an old-school, civics textbook commitment to document-heavy investigative reporting, which he sees as crucial.

"For democracy to operate effectively, the public has to have confidence in its institutions," he says,. "We can bring to public attention things that are happening that shouldn't be happening."

Just reporting the what is simply not enough. The reporter says the press "has the ability to explain how decisions get made, to give citizens a sense of understanding and comfort that there is some transparency. It's up to reporters to figure out why things happen, to show the why and the how."

And it's clear Jaquiss found the right niche for himself after he fled Wall Street and graduated from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He liked the fact that Willamette Week had a tradition of aggressive investigative journalism before he got there in 1998. The paper's leadership has been extremely supportive of his digging, even when it has upset advertisers and cost the the paper serious money.

"These guys are fearless," he says of editor Mark Zusman and publisher Richard Meeker. "When I come up with a story I want to do, they never bat an eye," adding that they "bet the paper" on both the Goldschmidt and Adams stories.

One of the disheartening things about the financial challenges facing traditional media in the digital age has been the sharp reduction in many venues of investigative reporting. But Willamette Week shows you don't need huge resources to pull off big stories. The paper has three, count 'em three, reporters, down from five-and-a-half, Jaquiss says.

In addition to pursuing his probes, Jaquiss still has to feed the beast much of the time with daily blog posts and weekly stories.

So how come the alt weekly has scooped the big media player in town, The Oregonian, on all of these major stories? Jaquiss points out that large institutions can be hard-to-move bureaucracies, while for Jaquiss it's just him and his editor, managing editor for news Brent Walth, an Oregonian alum. Then there's the alt weekly's investigative tradition and its appetite for taking on cows, no matter how sacred,

Jaquiss calls himself the "reporter of last resort," the person sources turn to after other avenues haven't worked out. He says some of his greatest hits have been "really obvious, or stories others have passed on." The Oregonian famously moved quite slowly when it got the tip about Goldschmidt.

Jaquiss' most recent scoop centered on an influence-peddling scandal involving the dual roles of Kitzhaber's fiancée and Oregon's first lady, Cylvia Hayes. Hayes, who has a consulting business, also served as an unpaid adviser to Kitzhaber. Jaquiss reported that Hayes' firm had received private contracts from groups trying to influence state policy. "The governor's weakness was his unwillingness to hold her to ethical standards," Jaquiss says.

At the end of our phone conversation, I told Jaquiss I was speaking to students next week at Arizona State University's Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication. What advice, I asked him, would he like me to pass along?

"Tell the students that there are still unbelievable stories to be investigated, reported and told," he replied. "And you can do those stories without a whole lot of money."

Exactly.