The
March Alliance for Audited Media report showed that the
Oregonian has fallen out of the top 25 U.S. daily newspapers in terms of circulation.
Willamette Week now reports that the
Oregonian may be preparing to downsize to take it completely out of the list of the nation's daily print newspapers.
There are new signs that the owners of The Oregonian are moving forward with plans to end daily publication of the state's biggest newspaper.
On
May 17, the Oregonian Publishing Co. filed an application with the U.S.
Patent and Trademark Office for protection of a new brand name: Oregonian Media Group.
For
the employees of the state's biggest newspaper—and anyone concerned by
the paper's already weakened state—this is an ominous move.
Advance Publications,
the newspaper's owner, established a very similar sounding brand name,
NOLA Media Group, in New Orleans when it took that city's once-great
newspaper, the Times-Picayune, and turned it into a three-day-a-week publication.
In a telling reply to
Willamette Week's question on the matter, the
Oregonian's publisher, N. Christian Anderson III, did not deny that downsizing was in the works.
"We may use Oregonian Media Group in the future to reflect the growing
portfolio of print and digital products we offer consumers and
advertisers," Anderson writes. "I don’t have anything more definitive to
share at this time."
4 comments:
Good catch, TD! I've been waiting for The Zero to downsize further ever since they were taken by Advance. That it's taken this long is what's surprising. And the brand itself seems prophetic:
OMG!
OMG! Heh!
If the paper were to aggresively report, I'd be willing to subscribe. But reportage has become a lost art. And it's easier to sell headlines than teach civics.
.
OG, when I want any good reporting now I look to the Willamette Week or to the Salem Statesman Journal (on PEBB). The pickings are slim, but much better than at the Oregonian.
A recent example is that a Statesman Journal reporter noted that a bill sponsored by Republicans allowing Oregon public universities to leave the PEBB system would save $67 million (a lot of that in tuition charges). The Oregonian didn't have anything on this even though they have supposedly had public benefit costs to public education in their crosshairs. They have been trumpeting how the PERS system makes Oregon public education so much more expensive, but nothing on an easy $67 million savings to Oregon university students.
Just think 9 years ago the Oregonian unearthed every dirty thing they could on a guy who played a 10 second part in a anti-Kerry ad (Al French). But, they haven't been able to dig up one speck of information on any Oregonian affected by the IRS scandal. No unfair audits, nothing.
They're just not trustworthy to report on serious matters.
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