The Paper Chase

The next day, as Barack Obama took his first stab at the oath of office on a frigid day in Washington, a shaken Adams was on his way back to Portland from a lobbying trip to the Capitol, preparing to face a hostile crowd of reporters he'd repeatedly lied to in 2007, to explain that he'd had sex with Breedlove several times beginning a few weeks after the young man's 18th birthday, to apologize, to ask for forgiveness. Calls for Adams's resignation came immediately afterward, from the editorial boards of The Oregonian, The Portland Tribune, The Portland Business Journal and Just Out, the city's oldest gay publication.

Others rallied around the mayor, who had become strangely lionized by the second or third day of the scandal. In the minds of hundreds who commented on newspaper stories and spoke at pro-Adams rallies, Portland would crumble without the leadership of its new mayor. Furthermore, his sex life shouldn't be anyone else's business, they argued. Adams spent the days after the scandal mulling his fate, seeking advice from his friends and colleagues, trying to decide whether his short career as mayor of Portland was over and whether his ambitious 100-day agenda for a city with a nearly double-digit unemployment rate had come to a screeching halt.

Jaquiss's scoop is significant not only because it represents the second huge political figure his journalism has humbled in a period of four years, but also because of whom he beat out to get the story: the much larger and much more heavily financed Oregonian.

Over the years, the daily has earned something of a reputation in Oregon for avoiding sacred cows, after it dropped the ball on two gigantic stories: the sexual abuse and harassment of female staffers and lobbyists by Sen. Bob Packwood in the 1980s, a story The Washington Post broke even after Packwood reportedly harassed one of the Oregonian's own reporters; and the Goldschmidt scandal, which the paper not only failed to pursue but took a beating from the public over after accepting the former governor's confession and using his choice of words—"affair"—to describe what Oregon law considers rape in its front-page headline. (State law defines sexual intercourse with a person under age 16 as third-degree rape, a felony.)

Now the big boys were getting their hats handed to them again. Oregonian metro columnist Anna Griffin wrote an opinion column after the news broke, explaining that she had gotten the tip, and that certain aspects of it seemed plausible, given the mayor's willingness to flirt and his overt sexuality. The mayor took gay members of his campaign team to steam baths during his 2004 run for city council, Griffin added. At the same time, she had a hard time believing it. "Our mayor also has massive ambitions, for himself and his city. Would he throw all that away for a fling?" she wrote. Adams had denied the rumors, and others backed him up: "Casual sex with a barely legal intern? It seemed ridiculous. This is, after all, the most eligible gay bachelor in town we're talking about, handsome and worldly and charming in a brainy, almost goofy way."

The Oregonian printed several stories about the allegations when they were first aired, interviewed Breedlove and checked the mayor's phone records over a six-month period, the newspaper's editor, Sandy Rowe, wrote in an e-mail to NEWSWEEK. Nothing substantial came up, according to Rowe, but Jaquiss got an anonymous tip last April that reinvigorated his work, and by the time the November e-mail about the bathroom incident arrived at several local media outlets, "he knew what he was after and jumped on it." She added, "Nigel has built quite a reputation with sex scandal stories, and deservedly so. He is dogged and very good at that genre."

After Jaquiss won his Pulitzer for the Goldschmidt story, the director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism told the Los Angeles Times that the fact that he'd scooped the major daily in town pointed to the declining investment the mainstream media was willing to make in investigative reporting, leaving it to smaller, independent outlets to dig for the deepest dirt. Tim Gleason, the dean of journalism at University of Oregon, sees the same cutbacks affecting coverage of the Adams scandal: "Larger news organizations are giving up whatever advantage their size and resources once gave them." Of course, the subject matter at hand can also be an issue. Many mainstream news organizations—including NEWSWEEK—have had difficult internal debates about where to draw the lines in covering the private lives of public figures.

But Jaquiss views that as a copout, an overly simple explanation for a problem that is more about one-newspaper towns being a little too cozy with local power brokers.

The Oregonian has acknowledged that the Adams story has presented editors with "tricky questions," as Managing Editor Therese Bottomly put it in a Jan. 26 blog post. Adams's boyfriend, Peter Zuckerman, is a reporter at The Oregonian, and an attorney who sometimes represents the paper has spoken publicly against the press coverage of Adams and has recently taken on Breedlove as a client. The mayor's spokesman, who quit his job without explanation the day Adams returned to Portland, is also a former Oregonian reporter.