Oregon Media Central

According to their website, “Founded in June 2009 by Mitch Nolan, Oregon Media Central is dedicated to fair coverage of the media in Oregon and Southwest Washington.” Essentially, OMC wants to act as the link between the happenings of the Oregon media scene and the public. With a mission such as that it is important for OMC to have insider relations with varying new agencies. As was posted by Mitch Nolan himself on the Portland Mercury’s website, “Gmail wanted to automatically show everybody who my anonymous sources are. Fortunately, I caught it.”

It is therefore not much of a stretch to assume that Mitch Nolan has worked very hard at either building valuable relationships with people inside of the media world here in Portland or he is being passed a lot of information via anonymous tipsters. Either way, it seems to me, that OMC could be used in a number of ways that could be financially or personally damaging to people who need to be seen as seamless, the media. I would personally hope that the operators of OMC understand this.

Being that the subject of the blog is in fact the actual media and their product, information, it is important to address the significance of this relationship. From an information consumption perspective, having a resource such as OMC is valuable, yes. I imagine that the real value in having OMC will be in their allowing for commentary and providing an opportunity for backroom media operations to be exposed. Other than that it will be a game of whether or not OMC can provide original content consistently over time.

So similar to the issues of most media, we must wait until we are told.

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