Adios, Luciana

With an alliterative name like Luciana Lopez, it's only fitting that "versatile" and "vivacious" come to mind in describing my colleague.

Make that ex-colleague. Sigh.

A day after saying goodbye to the retiring Frank Ragulsky (see Adios, Frank), today I said goodbye and good luck to Luciana.

After five-plus years at the paper, beginning as a suburban communities and education reporter and, more recently, serving as the paper's pop music critic, Luciana is headed to Sao Paulo on June 8 to cover the Brazilian economy for Reuters news service. Did I say versatile?

Luciana is of Brazilian and Puerto Rican heritage and speaks fluent Portuguese, so she'll be in fine shape linguistically and culturally, having also lived in Brazil for a year as a child and made several trips since then to visit relatives.

We met this morning at Besaw's, a fabulous breakfast joint in Northwest Portland, and covered lots of ground in a little over an hour. Luciana is a total East Coaster -- with a go-go personality, and plenty of ambition and drive to go along with a great educational foundation (University of Virginia, followed by the University of Maryland graduate journalism school). Did I say vivacious?

She came to The Oregonian through a post-graduate minority internship program that brought a rich stream of diverse talent to the paper starting in the early 1990s. Many of the program's graduates continue to work here as photographers and reporters, but we've also seen many others leave as professional opportunities beckon and family ties exert their pull from various regions of the country.

As someone who played a key role in shaping the program and recruiting the most promising candidates from coast to coast, I can say unequivocally that The Oregonian's readers and our newsroom have been exceptionally well served by the level of talent -- and the rich cultural perspectives -- that have informed the journalism done by these people (mostly women) of color. It's been especially important to have their contributions in a city and state whose demographics remain heavily tilted toward whites.

Some of those who launched their careers here in Portland have gone to The New York Times, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe and The Associated Press -- all of them among the mostly highly regarded news organizations in the country.

It will be sad to see Luciana leave -- yet another superbly talented person of color moving on to bigger and better things. At the same time, it's exciting to join her in looking ahead to what comes next. Nothing she accomplishes in journalism will surprise me.

Check out a couple of essays she wrote for the Sunday Opinion section -- "The delight of democracy" and "On being a 'mutt' like Obama".

Also see this beautifully done feature -- "As teen recovers from shooting, two families pull closer togther" -- on an Italian exchange student who was shot outside a downtown Portland night club earlier this year.

There's a going-away party for Luciana early next week. One more chance to say thanks and wish her the best of luck.