Portland, Ore.

Market Profile.

IN ITS ANNUAL "BEST PLACES TO LIVE" ISSUE LAST YEAR, MONEY MAGAZINE SELECTED Portland, Ore., as the "best big city" in the U.S. Portland features many amenities of urban life, including a light-rail system and trendy shops and restaurants downtown, without some of the headaches that other large cities are experiencing. Portland has evolved from its origins as a logging town into a burgeoning high-tech metropolis with more than 1,200 technology firms, including Intel Corp., the area's largest private-sector employer with about 11,000 employees. Other high-tech companies with major outposts in the Portland area include Hewlett-Packard, NEC and Epson. Sportswear giant Nike is headquartered in suburban Beaverton.

The lure of high-tech jobs, coupled with Portland's less hectic, uncluttered quality of life, continue to attract new residents, including many who move north from California. More than half of Portland residents are not natives of the area.

Four counties in the southwest corner of Washington state are part of the Portland DMA; two of the counties, Skamania and Clark, are in the Portland metro area. However, more than 85 percent of the metro's popelation lives within the Portland city limits.

The NBA's Portland Trail Blazers played in the Memorial Coliseum for 25 years before moving into the Rose Garden arena to start the 1995-96 season. The 20,000-plus-capacity Rose Garden is considered one of the best facilities in the NBA. The arena was the result of a public-private partnership led by Paul Allen, chairman of the Seattle-based media investment firm Vulcan Ventures and cofounder of Microsoft Corp. Allen has owned the Trail Blazers since 1988.

Probably the most-talked-about recent development on Portland's local media scene has been the launch of the Portland Tribune, a twice-weekly newspaper. The free paper launched Feb. 11 with a distribution of 150,000 and has won praise for its lively presentation. The paper is the brainchild of Portland-based textile tycoon Robert Pamplin Jr., one of the wealthiest people in the Pacific Northwest.

The Tribune's news coverage focuses on community issues around Portland and developments in the state capital, Salem, that affect the market. Recent stories have covered budgeting concerns facing Portland's public school system, problems in the city police bureau, layoffs by local manufacturers and a "day on the set" of a...