Content area
Full Text
Portland's Willamette Week turned its image on its ear with a redesign that redefined the free weekly.
Wednesday. Portland, Oregon. Through the intermittent rain, thousands of residents all over the city head toward metal boxes to pick up their free weekly source for local news, reviews, and classifieds. Today, Willamette Week hits the stands.
A hefty tabloid with a strategy and an edge, Willamette Week offers anyone new to Portland, as I am, a crash course on the city through the weekly's alternative attitude and approach. It has a liberal political stance in a relatively conservative city, a chastising point of view, even a "rogue of the week," as well as the usual arts and entertainment, all shaped by staff writers whose mission is "to provide our audiences with an independent and irreverent understanding of how their city works so they can make a difference." But what distinguishes this giveaway from others of its kind is not merely substance but style. It looks good. It eschews the earnest graphics and punk poses typically associated with the alternative press to forge, well, a Portland paper.
Willamette Week was founded 25 years ago this November by Oregon native Ron Buel, the Wall Street Journal's youngest bureau chief, who returned to the Pacific Rim with the goal of launching a new type of medium that would serve as an antidote to the coverage of the city's dailies (of which only The Oregonian remains). He succeeded. Two of his proteges-Richard Meeker is now the WW publisher and co-owner with editor Mark Zusman-have made the paper their legacy as well. In 1998, the paper won 13 awards from the Greater Oregon Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists and top honors from the National Education Writers Association. Since then, each month it attracts a loyal readership of 365,200 "active, well-educated socially conscious, and aware consumers.
As the alternative press has grown, splintering into more narrowly focused voices, Willamette Week has also become a target for critics. Jim Redden, a former WW staffer whose own alternative newspaper, PDXS, recently folded, finds it boring. "Its reporters don't do enough hard-hitting exposes. They are not reporting on the black community or police brutality. They are not covering the economic underground or the...