To our readers: Each year on the occasion of Willamette Week's birthday, I try to provide an overview of this newspaper's performance during the past 12 months. I do so for a reason that's understood by everyone who works here: You are the single most important consideration in all we do. Without you our reporting would have substantially less impact. Without you our advertisers would have scant reason to continue to provide us with the wherewithal to publish. Without you we would be unable to fulfill our main goal--to produce journalism that makes a difference in the life of this city. Happily, over the past year, your number has risen from 337,000 to 348,000. Market surveys indicate that you provide us with audience demographics other publishers would die for, but what's more important is that you are actively involved in all aspects of the life of this vibrant community. With this issue Willamette Week celebrates its 24th anniversary, signaling the final year of our first quarter century. These days our paper bears only a passing resemblance to the undercapitalized venture I joined as a reporter fresh out of law school in 1974. This fall, for the sixth straight year, I can report that we're in good shape in all key areas--editorially, financially and emotionally. I. Our Product Willamette Week has always won many journalism awards, and once again this year we are almost embarrassed by the accolades--both local and national--that have come our way. In the past, most of our awards have been for reporting. This year we've been recognized for graphic excellence as well. For example, the "Lil Smurf" cover won a prestigious Society of Publication Designers Award, and "Nike Psyche" was honored by Print magazine. More important than awards, however, is the journalism itself. From the global (Nike) to the local (Oregon Ballet Theater's dance school), from concerns about the mindless expansion of state-sponsored gambling to our diligent efforts to engage readers in this fall's election, we have attempted to push and prod our community toward continual self-improvement. This, in effect, is our religion, and we continue to believe that stories that are well-reported, thoughtfully written and effectively presented can change the Portland area for the better. If I have any complaint with our editorial product, it's that I haven't been able to figure out a way to use it to leverage finder's fees out of The Oregonian. II. Our Finances I doubt you'll ever find any of Portland's large, privately held media companies disclosing key financial details to readers, viewers or listeners. Most of them make so much money they'd be embarrassed to let the information out. For example, my guess is that The Oregonian's gross annual revenues exceed $400 million and that the daily's net pretax profit is somewhere between $70 and $90 million. At a projected $6.2 million this fiscal year, our revenues represent little more than 1.5 percent of the daily's. This is an increase of 15 percent over last year, with growth in classified advertising sales leading the way. If the year continues as we expect, Willamette Week's pretax profits will approach $600,000--or about two-thirds of a percent of The Oregonian's estimated profit. Though such numbers could not possibly satisfy big media companies' enormous appetites for cash flow and profit, they represent our best financial performance ever. Some of that money has gone to fund losses at the paper we run in New Mexico (see below), while most has been reinvested here, allowing us to increase staff positions and upgrade equipment. III. Our Foray into Santa Fe As many of you know, we purchased the Santa Fe Reporter, a smaller weekly newspaper in northern New Mexico, a year ago this July. Since then we've had what would have to be described, euphemistically, as a learning experience. Running the Reporter has given us our single biggest challenge over the past year. All three of Willamette Week's owners (Russ Martineau, Mark Zusman and I) have spent a good deal of time in New Mexico as we've struggled to get the Reporter properly on its feet. Along the way we've made all manner of mistakes and have had to send significant resources to the Southwest. This past July, Barbara McDonald, who was then Willamette Week's manager of administration, moved to Santa Fe to become the Reporter's publisher. Soon thereafter, Audrey Van Buskirk, for many years WW's culture editor, and Ian Rutan, a star classified-sales rep here, joined her. The result has been a remarkable turnaround; today the Reporter is redesigned and repositioned and once again producing important local journalism unavailable to readers of Santa Fe's daily newspaper. Today the Reporter is financially stable. Here in Portland, Lori Wyman has taken Barbara's place as manager of administration, and I'm pleased to report that Willamette Week's new culture editor, Caryn Brooks, will begin next Monday. IV. The Bigger Picture As part of this report, I try each year to locate our efforts in the larger media world. Looking back over the past year, what's most apparent is the continuing--and accelerating--morphing of news into entertainment, especially on television. It was 35 years ago this month--immediately following President John Kennedy's assassination--that the majority of Americans suddenly shifted to television as their basic source of news. Back then, broadcasters like Fred Friendly and Walter Cronkite set the tone for television news. They sought to use the medium to tell the truth and promote the values of public service. Their style of news reporting later brought the Vietnam War into our living rooms and helped put an end to the biggest miscalculation in this nation's recent history. Now, the big names in television are Rupert Murdoch and Michael Eisner. "News" by any reasonable definition has no part in their stock in trade. Rather, their business is show business. This discouraging turn of events has led former TV news correspondent Marvin Kalb--now at the Shorenstein Center on Press and Politics at Harvard--to call what we see on TV the "new news." Last week New York Times op-ed columnist Frank Rich used Kalb's definition to discuss how the Lewinsky affair has put a "stain on our civic institutions." "Monicagate didn't create this culture" in which the imperatives are "star performances, suspenseful plot twists, sex, celebrity, and box-office profit," Rich wrote. "The Gulf War, O.J. and the death of Princess Di were all dry runs for the premise that news could be produced as long-run entertainment in the style of a nonfiction miniseries. "Just as crucially," Rich noted "[Monicagate] arrived after all three major networks and CNN had been swallowed up by media giants, some of them (Disney, Time Warner) show biz incarnate. Now there's no turning back." In other words, the old journalistic rules no longer apply on television: "Show-biz criteria now dictate not only how news is covered but what news is covered." In all of this I draw encouragement from how newspapers have responded--not by imitating TV news, but by paying greater attention to what's important in America's communities. From The New York Times to The Oregonian (yes, The Oregonian) to Willamette Week, American's newspapers are running counter to the trend, building audiences and making money by producing reporting that follows the old rules. We continue to emphasize the local in stories that are heavily analytical--and we steadfastly refuse to dumb down our stories or pander to readers. In print such reporting attracts and holds readers in a way that television does not. During the past year, some of our driest cover stories (our analysis of John Kitzhaber's first term in office, for example, or our story detailing how young people virtually abstained from the spring primary) had among the highest pick-up rates of any papers we published. With the strength and authority you provide as loyal readers, we can continue to battle the show-biz leanings of the media industry effectively and profitably. Only with more direct involvement from you, however, can we maintain a clear sense of direction. In particular, we need your responses to our work: Where do you disagree with our editorial judgments? What should we do to improve? What stories are we missing? Most important, where have we gotten something wrong? No matter how hard we try, no matter how many layers of editing and checking we impose on our work, we still make mistakes. Unless you tell us, we cannot correct them. Please let me hear from you. You can write (c/o WW, 822 SW 10th Ave., Portland OR 97205), call (503-243-2122), fax (503-243-2122) or e-mail (rmeeker@wweek.com). In the meantime, I send you thanks and best wishes from all of us here at Willamette Week. Richard H. Meeker Publisher - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Willamette Week | originally published November 4, 1998