It’s tough to be a craft brewer these days, whether that’s in Oregon or elsewhere in the nation. Shifting consumer demands, including for non-alcohol beer, along with rising costs and market saturation have contributed to declining craft beer sales in recent years. In Oregon, the abrupt closure of Rogue Ales last November after nearly 40 years was a stark reminder that even iconic brands aren’t immune to the industry’s struggles. 

It’s against this backdrop that four Central Oregon breweries and a cidery recently announced the formation of the Oregon Beverage Collective. The new partnership includes Cascade Lakes Brewing Company, Silver Moon Brewing, Crux Fermentation Project, GoodLife Brewing Company and Tumalo Cider Company. The OBC aims to share resources and manage rising costs for supplies and ingredients. Crux’s production facility in Bend will now be responsible for brewing most of the OBC’s craft beverages. Crux Fermentation Project has also been acquired by the Rhine family, which owns Cascade Lakes Brewing. 

Andy Rhine, co-owner of Cascade Lakes Brewing and President of OBC, says the collective will allow each of the brands to retain its own identity while fostering new collaborations between them. Rhine joins us, along with Steve Augustyne, CEO of OBC and owner of Silver Moon Brewing, to share what this collective model offers for both brewers and consumers.

A veritable gold rush appears to be opening up, not in the dusty hills of California but in the deep seabeds of the Pacific Ocean that’s being driven by an insatiable global demand of critical minerals that power our electric cars, smartphones, computer chips and more. While manganese, nickel, cobalt and other critical minerals are currently being mined on land, they could also be extracted by mining seabeds in locations like Gulf of Alaska seamounts or near the U.S. territories of American Samoa and the Mariana Islands. 

Last April, President Trump issued an executive order directing federal agencies to fast-track the review and issuing of exploration licenses and commercial recovery permits for seabed minerals.

The Metals Company, based in Canada, has applied for an exploration license and commercial recovery permit in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, a massive band of the Pacific Ocean stretching between Hawai’i and Mexico that is thought to be rich in deposits of critical minerals. Last May, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management approved a request from California-based Impossible Metals to begin a leasing process to explore for deep-sea minerals off the coast of American Samoa. 

Despite these companies’ claims that deep-sea mining is a more ethical and environmental alternative to terrestrial mining, it is rife with uncertainty and poses grave risks to the health and biodiversity of the deep ocean, according to Astrid Leitner, an oceanographer and assistant professor in the College of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences at Oregon State University. She joins us to share more details, including the research she has done on deep sea ecosystems in areas the Trump administration is now interested in opening up to mining.

Home Forward, the housing authority for Portland and Multnomah County, is the largest provider of affordable housing in the state. Reporting from Willamette Week has found that the agency has an unusually high vacancy rate and takes, on average, half a year to fill vacant units at some of its properties. The lack of rental revenue from empty units is making it difficult for the agency to pay off its debts.

Sophie Peel is a reporter for Willamette Week covering Portland City Hall and neighborhoods. She joins us with more details about her investigation into Home Forward.

The Oregon state Senate may soon take up the bill that would enshrine additional protections for Oregonian patients and providers of reproductive services or gender-affirming care. That bill, HB 4088, has already passed in the House and has been referred to the Senate by committee. Chief sponsor Rep. Lisa Fragala (D-Eugene) says the bill reflects a commitment to the rights of Oregonians to access these types of medical care and retain their privacy. Fragala joins us with more on the legislation. We also hear from Rep. Virgle Osborne (R- Roseburg) who voted against the bill.

In the last decade, more than 150 teachers in Washington were disciplined for sexual misconduct. But new reporting from Investigate West found that many of these cases weren’t easily accessible to the public. The reason the information is hidden? When a teacher voluntarily surrenders their license, their information in the state’s misconduct database is shielded from public view. Nearly 45% of teachers on this database volunteered to surrender their license. Moe Clark is a collaborative investigative journalist for IW and a Murrow News Fellow through Washington State University. She joins us to share more.

There were more than 70,000 cases of alleged drug use during pregnancy sent to law enforcement officials across 21 states over six years, including Oregon. As reported in The Marshall Project, these cases involved unreliable drug tests that show inaccurate results, are difficult to read or are simply wrong. In Oregon, and in 12 other states, welfare agencies automatically report any positive test result to authorities. Shoshana Walter is a staff writer for The Marshall Project and reported on this trend with Jill Castellano. Walter joins us to share more on these tests.

Susan Sokolowski holds more than 100 patents, most of which she earned during the nearly 18 years she worked as a sports product designer at Nike. One of her favorite patents was for Flyknit, a knitted fabric upper that’s lightweight and provides a sock-like fit on shoes. The inspiration for it came, she says, from conversations she had with women athletes while working as a designer on Nike’s women’s footwear division, which launched in 2002. While at Nike, she also helped design shoes worn by women gymnasts at the 2008 Summer Olympics and track and field uniforms worn by Team USA at the 2016 Summer Olympics. That same year, Sokolowski left Nike to launch University of Oregon’s first graduate program in sports product design. 

Sokolowski was named by USA Today as one of its 2025 Women of the Year in recognition for her work championing and designing sports apparel and products made specifically for women such as sports bras and women’s running shoes. She joins us to discuss her trailblazing career and the big trends, challenges and future of this industry, from sustainable fabrics to equipment for athletes with disabilities.

Artificial intelligence is beginning to change the entry-level job market. AI often automates the repetitive tasks that might otherwise allow new employees to learn on the job, and some worry it could eventually replace those jobs altogether. A study from Stanford University found these changes were most likely to affect “AI exposed occupations” such as software development and customer service.

Lucas Hellberg is an enterprise reporter for the Daily Emerald newspaper at the University of Oregon and an elections reporting intern for Lookout Eugene-Springfield. He recently wrote about how AI is changing entry-level jobs in Oregon, and joins us with more details.

College newspapers are often on shoestring budget, and at the same time they’re a vitally important source of information — especially for their student readers. At the University of Oregon’s The Daily Emerald and Portland State University’s The Vanguard, reporters have been tear-gassed while covering immigration protests. Though reporters at Oregon State University’s The Daily Barometer have not faced that challenge, the editor-in-chief says the paper would like to be prepared for that situation if it arises. All three papers also cover stories in the community that affect the campus. Managing these competing priorities with limited resources can be a major challenge. We get more details from the editors-in-chief at the University of Oregon, Oregon State University and Portland State University: Tarek Anthony, Jenna Benson and Noah Carandanis.

Next Friday, the 2026 Paralympic Games kick off in Milan Cortina, the same region in Northern Italy which hosted the recently concluded Winter Olympics. Anna Soens is an alpine skier from Bend with incomplete paralysis who earned a spot on the Team USA roster. She will now head to Italy to join more than 650 athletes from around the world vying for victory in nearly 80 medal events. 

It is her first time competing in the Paralympics where she has qualified for five events:  downhill, super-G, alpine combined, giant slalom and slalom. The achievement is even more impressive considering that she has only been skiing with the use of adaptive equipment for less than a decade after an accident at a Portland rock climbing gym left her with incomplete paralysis below the hips. In 2018, Soens became the first woman with paraplegia to summit Mt. Hood, which she did with her father, and she is the first person to descend its summit using a sit-ski. 

Soens joins us to share her remarkable athletic journey and hopes for her Paralympic races.