UO E-clips, Aug. 6

Boob Tube (Willamette Week): If local TV reporters decided to run with the following story, you can bet it would top the 11 o’clock news. All the elements are there -- plenty of skin, allegations of indecency, and claims that bigoted corporate bad guys shafted a longtime local celebrity. … In a lawsuit filed July 29 in Multnomah County Circuit Court, former KOIN news director Jeff Alan claims management fired him for raising objections about a staff shakeup by the station’s new owners. According to Alan, when Atlanta-based New Vision Television was negotiating to buy KOIN last year, it insisted longtime sports anchor Ed Whelan be fired as a condition of the deal. Whelan lost his job Aug. 20, 2007, a move the lawsuit ascribes to discrimination, though it doesn’t say how. And Whelan couldn’t be reached for comment. After KOIN’s sale was finalized Nov. 1, Alan says his new supervisor, Chris Sehring, forced him to hire reporter Kacey Montoya from a station in Palm Springs, Calif., at the insistence of corporate higher-ups -- despite the fact that Alan found what the suit calls “sexual, pornographic or otherwise inappropriate” photos of Montoya being sold on the Web with “some quick Internet searches.”… For Tim Gleason, head of the University of Oregon’s journalism school, the flap over Montoya’s modeling shows the blurry line between news and entertainment. “Broadcast news is losing audience. And as broadcast news tries to attract audience, we see increasingly this tension between entertainment value and traditional news values,” Gleason says.

Green building helping China recover from earthquake (OPB News): American eyes will look to China later this week, when Beijing’s summer Olympic games open. But engineers and architects in Oregon have been looking to China for another reason. It's been almost three months since a catastrophic earthquake killed thousands of people in Sichuan Province. Now, Oregon experts are helping guide China’s post-earthquake reconstruction. … Well, last year, Oregon engineers and architects went to China, to meet with officials and come up with a green design for a school building. They hoped to start a green building revolution throughout China. The University of Oregon got involved, along with two Chinese universities.