(Posted earlier but updated to include comments from Amy Ruiz).

My former colleague Amy Ruiz (nee Amy Jenniges) is, as many Stranger readers already know, currently a sustainability and urban policy advisor to Portland Mayor Sam Adams, lately in the news for lying about his relationship with an 18-year-old legislative assistant named Beau Breedlove. Ruiz came to Adams' office after six years as a staff reporter at the Stranger and two years as news editor at the Portland Mercury, the Stranger's sister paper. Ruiz, along with her co-news editor Scott Moore, had pursued the Adams story in 2007, but dropped the story after the reporters were unable to substantiate the charges (and after Adams lied to them, twice, about the allegations.) This week, Nigel Jaquiss, a reporter for Mercury competitor Willamette Week, broke the story that Adams had lied about the relationship. Jaquiss's story strongly implied that Ruiz was unqualified for her position, and that Adams had hired Ruiz to take her off the story. It also raised the question of whether Ruiz had stopped working on the story to increase her chances of getting the job.

Before I go into why I think that scenario is unlikely, let me say that the idea of Amy sitting on a story to get a job is preposterous. The fact is, sometimes your competitor gets the story; in this case, as Merc editor Steve Humphrey notes, the Mercury didn't have the goods. The alternative —running a story alleging the mayor had been sleeping with a teenager without evidence or on-the-record sources—would have been irresponsible and unethical.

But the fact that Adams hired Ruiz—knowing that he had lied to her about his relationship with Breedlove, knowing what it would look like if the story ever came out—raises some obvious questions, including whether Ruiz was qualified for the job. In comments on Slog and the Mercury, as well as posts on Gawker and the Poynter Institute, observers have concluded that Ruiz was unqualified and called for her to resign0; "Amy Ruiz is NOT, I repeat NOT qualified for her position at all. Adams needs to resign NOW, and Amy needs to resign now or be fired!" one typical Mercury commenter says.

I can't speak to the specific qualifications for this particular job, because I wasn't at the interviews and don't know what the rest of the applicant pool was like. What I can say is that journalists frequently go into government work, and that they often do well there. Writers—particularly writers at alt-weeklies like the Mercury, which was paying Ruiz about $42,000 for a management-level position—often decide they'd like to make more money, or work fewer hours, or have a job with less daily stress. Staying in journalism for the rest of your life is not a part of the journalist's ethical compact. A few local journalists who've decided to move on to more lucrative pastures: Casey Corr; George Howland; Jean Godden; Marty McOmber; Alex Fryer; Jim Compton; Robert Mak; Sandeep Kaushik; James Bush. And those are just the ones I can think of off the top of my head. Many more, certainly, have been approached to work on campaigns or in government positions and said no.

Politicians like to hire journalists not because we tend to have post-bachelor's degrees or extensive policy experience, or because they think it's a smart way to get good reporters off their backs, but because we know how to communicate to the media—what kind of communication gets good coverage, and what kind gets you ignored or mocked. It's speculation, but a fair assumption, that Ruiz's lack of urban-planning experience was eclipsed by her long experience as a member of the press.

In an email, Ruiz describes her job as follows:

Day to day, this is a job of translating Sam [Adams]'s policy objectives to the Bureau of Planning and Sustainability, and translating their land use and sustainability projects to council, staff and stakeholders - both explaining the details of the projects, and their relevance to the broader city. My hard skills—asking tough questions, synthesizing and analyzing information—are invaluable. And my prior working relationships from the staff level on up to council members helps me move Sam's agenda forward.

What it comes down to is that I'm not writing land use code or rezoning the city—that's what the planners in the bureau do. I'm the conduit between the political objectives and vision in the Mayor's office, and the staff carrying out the great work.

The unanswered question, in my mind, is on Adams's side: Leaving aside whether Ruiz was the most qualified applicant, why did he hire her, knowing that the story of his relationship with Breedlove might come out? Since Adams isn't talking, we can only speculate: Maybe he was being nefarious, hoping to keep Ruiz off the story. If that's true, then he would have been smart to also hire Jaquiss, Moore, and all the Oregonian reporters who were chasing the same story—and their editors, too, while he was at it. More likely, Adams hubristically assumed the story would never come out, or didn't care what impact it would have on Ruiz and the rest of his staff. My guess is Adams was stupid or naive callous or all three; in any case, Adams, not Ruiz, is the bad guy here.

Sandeep—who left the Stranger in 2005 to work for King County Executive Ron Sims—offers his own take over here.