Thursday, December 20, 2007

Legal physician-assisted suicide, topic for Portland workshop

Don Colburn, an Oregonian reporter (and poet) who has extensively covered Oregon's Death with Dignity Act (also known as physician-assisted suicide), will be giving a presentation at the professional obituary writers workshop to be held in Portland, Ore., May 8-11.

Colburn will also be showing a multimedia presentation that chronicles the actual physician-assisted suicide, at which he was present, of a terminally ill Oregonian staff member.

Colburn will be available for questions about the law in Oregon, the only U.S. state that has legalized suicide with certain restrictions.

Al Tompkins of The Poynter Institute lauded The Oregonian for its coverage of this sensitive and controversial issue on "Al's Morning Meeting" page nearly two years ago.

This workshop will kick off a discussion on coverage of suicides in writing obituaries.

2 comments:

Jade Walker said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Jade Walker said...

I'm excited about this workshop. It sounds like it'll be quite informative. One of my favorite stories on this topic was published in The New York Times. It's called Voices of the Dying and I highly recommend everyone take a few minutes to view it here: http://tinyurl.com/3f4to