{"id":259,"date":"2021-12-15T16:19:31","date_gmt":"2021-12-16T00:19:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/writingthenorthwest.com\/?p=259"},"modified":"2024-06-25T10:38:07","modified_gmt":"2024-06-25T17:38:07","slug":"what-happens-to-our-knowledge-of-a-place-past-or-present-when-daily-newspapers-face-no-real-competition-in-reporting-the-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/writingthenorthwest.com\/?p=259","title":{"rendered":"What Happens to Our Knowledge of a Place\u2013Past or Present–When Daily Newspapers Face No Real Competition in Reporting the “News”?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

A few days ago, Portland\u2019s Willamette Week<\/em> brought momentary life to the local journalism scene by critiquing a new venture launched by its older, larger, and richer rival, The Oregonian<\/em>. The critique, by reporter Aaron Mesh<\/a>, is mild as critiques go, especially when judged by the rousing wars Northwest newspapers once engaged in, but it raises important questions about journalism today. One of them (raised, in part, by the mildness alone) is: What happens to our knowledge of a place–past or present–when daily newspapers face no real competition in reporting the news?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The venture Mesh critiques is the Oregonian<\/em>\u2019s three-month-old \u201cHere Is Oregon\u201d campaign<\/a>, an attempt, as the HIO website<\/a> says, to offer \u201ca mix of features centered around our mission, to lift and celebrate Oregon.\u201d Here\u2019s part of what Mesh writes:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For three months now, Here is Oregon\u2014which the paper\u2019s executives describe as a \u201clifestyle brand\u201d published on a website separate from OregonLive.com<\/a> <\/em>[the Oregonian\u2019s main website] and in designated features in The Oregonian\u2019s print edition\u2014has provided Oregonian readers with a version of reality free from violent death and political disputes. The stories that populate the new website dwell on hiking trails, gingerbread houses and downtown cleanups. They arrive on a website free from the pandemic, shootings and stories about the homeless.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

That\u2019s a dramatic break from the dire\u2014and usually accurate\u2014portrait of the city The Oregonian regularly presents to readers.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Your first thought might be: So what\u2019s the problem? What\u2019s wrong with the Oregonian<\/em> publishing more positive stories at a time when so much of the news, as Mesh suggests, is unrelentingly \u201cdire\u201d? To which I (and Mesh as well, I imagine) would answer: Nothing\u2026if those stories were woven into the newspaper\u2019s regular offerings and kept separate from content offered by businesses and trade groups.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The problem is: they\u2019re not. The HIO website says it is being produced \u201cby Oregonian Media Group in collaboration with our newsroom and marketing departments<\/em>.\u201d [Emphasis mine.] And what is Oregonian Media Group? Click over to its website <\/a>and you\u2019ll find this description: \u201cOregonian Media Group is a media company that provides strategic marketing and advertising solutions to businesses locally, regionally and nationally.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here\u2019s Mesh again:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The happy-news service is the brainchild of two Oregonian Media Group executives with close ties to the Portland Business Alliance, the city\u2019s chamber of commerce. In a year when Portland\u2019s reputation is circling the drain nationally, the newspaper, which is owned by the wealthy Newhouse family, is betting that readers want more stories dedicated to loyal geese and small-town heroes.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

But as an election looms where Portland\u2019s dismaying present and uncertain future are a top-of-mind issue for voters, The Oregonian\u2019s new strategy could create two competing narratives: gritty reality versus an airbrushed version of a hip, happy and healthy Oregon that some wish existed.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In other words, the \u201chappy-news service,\u201d developed in conjunction with marketers, advertisers, and business people, is offering a myth, a fantasy, an alternate reality, and doing so with the imprimatur of Portland\u2019s only daily newspaper (which makes it ipso facto Oregon\u2019s newspaper of record).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Kudos to Willlamette Week<\/em> (the only weekly to ever win a Pulitzer Prize in investigative journalism) <\/a>for questioning the motives, the concept, and the content in the Oregonian<\/em>\u2019s new offering. At a time when corporations and commerce are extending their tentacles into every corner of American society, it\u2019s important to ask what happens when our few remaining traditional news outlets divide the \u201cnews\u201d into \u201cnegative\u201d and \u201cpositive\u201d in order to offer a sunnier view to help businesses. How long before marketing surveys and focus-group results cause the harder news\u2014investigations of politicians and powerful business owners, reports of police abuse or neglect of crime, even community complaints\u2014to simply fade away?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But, Pulitzer aside, a weekly is no match for a well-financed daily. For one thing, it can\u2019t offer enough content to provide a counterpoint to whatever bent or bias the larger paper has. No matter how \u201cobjective\u201d the Oregonian<\/em>\u2019s professional reporters and editors try to be, they will see and hear only what they see and hear, and they will always be influenced to some degree by the values and intentions of those who own and run their newspaper. Which means the city\u2019s daily historical record contains only one primary point of view.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The same is true in Seattle, where the once-robust Post-Intelligencer<\/em> <\/a>has shrunk to an online-only publication, leaving the Seattle Times<\/a><\/em> as the city\u2019s only print daily.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The loss of America\u2019s daily newspapers isn\u2019t new anymore, of course. Nor is the question of where Americans can get reliable and relatively bias-free news about their communities today. My concern here is somewhat different. In doing research on Seattle in the earliest part of the 20th<\/sup> century, I\u2019ve been able to form a fuller picture of the city, its people, and its concerns by reading the often-different accounts of events and issues in the Seattle Times<\/em>, the Seattle P-I<\/em>, the long-gone Seattle Star<\/a><\/em>, and even an old weekly, the Argus<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Writers for those different papers, each with a different slant, often disagreed with each other, challenged each other, and strove to out-report and even out-reason each other. Because of that lively competition and difference, I\u2019m able to get a truer sense of what a place and its people were like than I could if there had been only one newspaper of record or, God forbid, those papers had let marketers and business people persuade them to divide the news into \u201cpositive\u201d and \u201cnegative.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The questions that concerns me are: How will future writers and historians determine the true nature of the people, issues, and troubles of our time? In the nearer future, how will we measure how far our society has progressed or regressed in particular areas if we lack more than one written viewpoint on what we experienced, discussed, and fought about from day to day? These questions grow harder and darker when we let our perceptions of what is \u201cpositive\u201d or \u201cnegative\u201d\u2014or the desires of marketers and business leaders\u2014determine where and how we report and record the \u201cnews.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A few days ago, Portland\u2019s Willamette Week brought momentary life to the local journalism scene by critiquing a new venture launched by its older, larger, and richer rival, The Oregonian. The critique, by reporter Aaron Mesh, is mild as critiques go, especially when judged by the rousing wars Northwest newspapers once engaged in, but it […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":260,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_uag_custom_page_level_css":"","_swt_meta_header_display":false,"_swt_meta_footer_display":false,"_swt_meta_site_title_display":false,"_swt_meta_sticky_header":false,"_swt_meta_transparent_header":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[102,99],"tags":[113,107,108,114,110,111,109,112,106],"class_list":["post-259","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-essays-definitions","category-latest-posts","tag-aaron-mesh","tag-here-is-oregon","tag-oregonian","tag-oregonian-media-group","tag-seattle-p-i","tag-seattle-star","tag-seattle-times","tag-the-argus","tag-willamette-week"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/writingthenorthwest.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/12\/newspaperarticlescollage.jpg","uagb_featured_image_src":{"full":["https:\/\/writingthenorthwest.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/12\/newspaperarticlescollage.jpg",512,592,false],"thumbnail":["https:\/\/writingthenorthwest.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/12\/newspaperarticlescollage-150x150.jpg",150,150,true],"medium":["https:\/\/writingthenorthwest.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/12\/newspaperarticlescollage-259x300.jpg",259,300,true],"medium_large":["https:\/\/writingthenorthwest.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/12\/newspaperarticlescollage.jpg",512,592,false],"large":["https:\/\/writingthenorthwest.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/12\/newspaperarticlescollage.jpg",512,592,false],"1536x1536":["https:\/\/writingthenorthwest.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/12\/newspaperarticlescollage.jpg",512,592,false],"2048x2048":["https:\/\/writingthenorthwest.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/12\/newspaperarticlescollage.jpg",512,592,false],"mailpoet_newsletter_max":["https:\/\/writingthenorthwest.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/12\/newspaperarticlescollage.jpg",512,592,false]},"uagb_author_info":{"display_name":"michael n. mcgregor","author_link":"https:\/\/writingthenorthwest.com\/?author=1"},"uagb_comment_info":0,"uagb_excerpt":"A few days ago, Portland\u2019s Willamette Week brought momentary life to the local journalism scene by critiquing a new venture launched by its older, larger, and richer rival, The Oregonian. The critique, by reporter Aaron Mesh, is mild as critiques go, especially when judged by the rousing wars Northwest newspapers once engaged in, but it…","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/writingthenorthwest.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/259","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/writingthenorthwest.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/writingthenorthwest.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/writingthenorthwest.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/writingthenorthwest.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=259"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/writingthenorthwest.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/259\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1362,"href":"https:\/\/writingthenorthwest.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/259\/revisions\/1362"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/writingthenorthwest.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/260"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/writingthenorthwest.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=259"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/writingthenorthwest.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=259"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/writingthenorthwest.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=259"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}