November 18, 1999

"Still Sweet, Still Home, Impressions of a Small Oregon Town at the Dawn of the New Millennium," a 32-page millennium supplement to the Sweet Home New Era, a community weekly newspaper, is being entirely produced by four University of Oregon journalism classes. Their assignment: to look at the community of 7,004 people through strangers’ eyes–as though they had just landed there in a space ship. They are looking at such issues as literacy, crime, safety net, economic change and decreasing reliance on timber, and the real hub of the city, "Sharon’s Bakery," which opens early (at 3 a.m.) to serve the first shift at the local mill–and for the past few weeks, UO journalism students. The supplement will be printed in December on a commercial press in Corvallis. Clyde Bentley, a UO doctoral student and graduate teaching fellow, and Sweet Home New Era publisher Alex Paul dreamed up the project while both were attending a National Newspaper Publishers Association conference on the East Coast last year. The Sweet Home Millennium Project is explained on Bentley’s website. There you can find all the reporters’ assignments and contacts, the project concept and logistical plans. Reporting students have completed nearly all of their interviews and initial story drafts. They begin team editing and rewrites on Thursday afternoon (Nov. 18) on the UO campus. (Their story on crime is having to be redone in light of this week’s murder in Sweet Home.) Photography students are finishing on-location shoots this week. Instructor Cindy Killion has a photographer and reporter going to Sweet Home at about 8-8:30 a.m. on Friday, Nov. 19, and is meeting with other class members at 9 a.m. Friday in the photo lab in Room 317 in Allen Hall, 1020 University St. on campus, to look at negatives and begin selecting prints. John Knowlton’s design class students begin working this week on design and layout and expect to finish next week. They meet from 2—3:30 p.m. on Mondays and Wednesdays.