Requiem for a newspaper

I have written several times about my affection for the Oregonian. It's dried up now.

The writing has been on the wall for a while, because there had been policy changes and layoffs, but the real death knell came last year, when they announced that it was splitting into two companies. One side would focus on the internet, and the other would be physical distribution. One aspect of that was that they would be switching to delivering only four days a week.

As luck would have it, that happened right around the time that I needed to update my billing information for our subscription, and I delayed for three months as I was trying to figure out if I even wanted to renew it. One thing that bothered me was that there was another service offering to deliver on the other days, so they were still producing a daily paper, just not delivering it to everyone.

It just got worse. Initially the delivery days were Wednesday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. Wednesday stopped coming, and I thought it might be a renewal issue, but the Wednesday features were showing up on Friday.

I thought it was odd that I could only do the new subscription for 13 weeks, and expected to hear something from them at the end of 13 weeks, but I did not. I returned to the website, which is a site that covers many newspapers, but it does not offer the Oregonian anymore. The three issues per week are still coming, most of the time, but I am not sure through whom, and again, I don't know that I would renew, because the quality has gone down so much.

That is the worst part. Not having a daily paper disrupts things like comics and crosswords, but those are not essential, and there are online options. While there are online options for news, it is not the same.

I do still see articles from many online sources, including the New York Times and the Atlantic and the Washington Post. That is fine, but that doesn't really give me local news. My area matters to me. Yes, we have local television news, but they are just repeating the same things over and over again, and without much enlightenment. The Oregonian had been a source of thoughtful reporting, with frequent award-winning in-depth investigation. Now it even looks like a tabloid, and there is no reason to believe that will get better:

http://www.wweek.com/portland/article-22187-the_click_factory.html

It is frustrating. We seem to still need the Sunday paper, for ads and coupons if nothing else, but we could just pick that one up and skip the rest of the week. I find that even when it is here, I tend not to look at it. That's hard to believe. I subscribed to the Oregonian when I was a broke college student. When I was a high school student at Girl's State I picked up an Oregonian every day. It hurts that it's become this.

I have thought about checking out some of the other local papers, like the Portland Tribune or Willamette Week, but even if they do end up a part of our rhythms, it's not going to be the same. The Oregonian is not what it was, and it's a loss.