Skip to main content
Dear readers,
I’ve spent much of the last month reflecting with our leadership team on what has been an important and difficult year for this city, and also mapping out WW’s goals for 2026. As we look back and ahead, it is traditional for me to give our readers a peek behind the curtain. Let’s get to it.
Our Journalism
Every year, what we cover and how we approach it shifts a little. Sometimes that’s intentional, and sometimes it’s reactive. But our mission remains the same: to enable Portlanders to better understand the city they live in and hopefully make it better. Our coverage is strategically shaped, largely by Editor Aaron Mesh, to have the widest impact we can with the resources we have. Here’s how we did that in 2025.
Our newsroom narrowed on beats that affect every Portlander, and we focused on accountability journalism.
In September 2024, Joanna Hou joined us to cover education, a beat we didn’t have prior to her arrival. There is arguably no issue more sensitive to cover. Joanna has done an incredible job elevating the issues readers need to know about. She’s spotlighted parents’ concerns over seismic upgrades, reported on bureaucratic challenges in managing money at Portland Public Schools, and has gracefully walked readers through the competing priorities at stake in the challenge to rebuild Jefferson High School amid low enrollment.
In August of this year, Andrew Schwartz joined us to cover health care, in part thanks to generous support from the Heatherington Foundation. He’s keeping readers informed on the massive impact Oregon is already feeling from cuts to Medicaid and the challenges of our broken mental health system. In just a few brief months, he’s shown a knack for understanding the complex systems that keep people from getting the care they need.
Sophie Peel continues to be an extraordinary watchdog at City Hall, and some of her best work included her coverage of an economic renewal experiment that left an East Portland neighborhood worse off than when it began. She’s focused much of her reporting on the City Council, and has held the council’s progressive caucus accountable to follow the same rules as everybody else (“Peacock” is now under investigation by the Oregon Government Ethics Commission). And, her story on the city’s inflexible Tree Code resulted in a restructuring of its enforcement.
I cannot omit the feature that Peel and Schwartz put together recently after an accidental fire destroyed City Councilor Candace Avalos’ car and burned one side of her home. The two spent weeks learning the decades long story of the man behind the fire, Vashon Locust, and how Oregon’s broken mental health system failed him.
A large focus of our newsroom is following how our tax dollars are spent. That work takes a better-than-average grasp of math, and an ability to translate dry tax regulations and economic concepts into plainspeak. Not many journalists can do this—but Anthony Effinger does it weekly, and makes it fun to read. He’s spent months digging through the accounting practices of publicly funded projects, exposing misspent dollars in housing initiatives, unspent dollars on solutions to homelessness, and how the tough downtown real estate market has major ramifications for the property taxes that fund much of our public services.
We’ve had to make tough choices when the events of the day invade Portland and threaten to sap the resources of a small newsroom. Instead of concentrating on spot news reporting (no shade, this is important work!), we’re looking at downstream stories that build context and center lived experiences. When the Orange Man declared his intention to send federal troops to ICE headquarters, instead of planting a reporter outside the building, we had our team tell the stories of locals abducted by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and dug through public records uncovering gross misconduct by federal agents.
We celebrated the good things readers can find in Portland and highlighted cultural communities at risk.
Our cultural coverage this past year continued to help readers discover this city in all its forms.
Under the leadership of our Arts & Culture editor, Robin Bacior, we expanded our coverage of food and music, launched a regular column spotlighting local businesses, introduced more book reviews, launched a food newsletter, and expanded some of our reporting to video. (Robin left WW this fall for California, and we’re conducting a search for her successor.)
In August, we polled insiders and featured the best drag preformers in town in a cover package championed by assistant Arts & Culture editor Andrew Jankowski. We’ve consistently covered how the changes in arts funding have affected many of our most beloved cultural institutions. Arts reporter Rachel Saslow’s deep dives into the financially precarious Rose Festival, and the grassroots inception of a Bike Bus are two stories that illustrate who we are as a city in 2025. And everyone on staff helped serve up useful service journalism about local resources for camping, crafting, green living, shopping, visual arts, sports, the great neighborhoods of our city, and much more.
Our Community
In addition to our journalism, we continue to find other ways to engage with this city we call home.
In September, we launched a new event: NestFest, celebrating local makers and home design. More than 1,500 people came to the Central Eastside to connect in person. In August, we held a reporters’ panel to discuss the political winds in local government. We sold out a comedy showcase at Rev Hall and expanded our annual Oregon Beer Awards with a Best in Beer Week. We launched Weed Week. And we continue to elevate local music through our Best New Bands showcase and weekly music coverage.
And the generosity of Oregonians continues to amaze us with the success of Give!Guide, our annual fundraising campaign for what amounts this year to 277 local nonprofits. (Please, visit giveguide.org and give now before our campaign ends Dec. 31.)
Our Finances
At a time when newsrooms are more vulnerable than ever, we’ve been fortunate to stay stable.
Overall, advertising is still our largest revenue stream, but it’s been relatively flat since mid-2023. Another sizable chunk of our revenue comes from a variety of small streams we’ve propped up or continue to foster, such as events, newspaper subscriptions, remnant ads on our website, and more.
Lastly (and if you made it this far into this letter, you’re probably already aware), our membership program, Friends of Willamette Week, is now a vital part of keeping our paper alive. It makes up almost 20% of our overall revenue.
We need that number to grow.
We have been a resource-strapped organization as long as I’ve been here. It’s part of what makes working at WW feel like magic: Everyone is here because they feel purpose in their work and, as a result, they lean in way beyond their job descriptions.
I’m in awe of our two-person production team that designs a paper each week—and reliably surmounts an art or deadline challenge we didn’t anticipate. Our circulation director and drivers deliver 25,000 papers to more than 600 locations in the middle of Tuesday night. Our sole copy editor (who has been with WW for 30-plus years) proofs every story before it hits our pages. Our sales team, which generates the lion’s share of WW’s revenue, handles hundreds of relationships and traffics thousands of creative assets. Give!Guide and Friends of Willamette Week are sustained by a lean crew. And one person does everything from invoicing to website management and payroll to keeping our hardware and software humming. (Shout-out to Brian Panganiban.)
Next week, as in previous years, we won’t print a paper, giving our team a bit of a well-deserved rest from weekly deadlines. We’ll still publish news online but at a slightly slower pace.
In 2026, we are committed to having an even greater impact on this city.
I feel an enormous responsibility to build a firmer financial foundation for the work our people produce.
I can only fulfill that duty to them—and we can only fulfill that duty to Portland—with your support.
Please, donate today at wweek.com/support.
Thank you for reading,
Anna Zusman
Publisher
