Skip to main content
This week marks our final print issue of the year. Next week, our team will get a bit of a break before 2024. This time of year is also when we deliver an update to you about the state of our business and our plans for the new year.
It is the first year I’ve written this note. I started as publisher on Jan. 1 of this year, after five years of working across various departments at WW. In addition to keeping the train running, I’ve spent a lot of time listening and learning. To that end, while it all feels fresh, I’d like to share some of what I’ve learned as a (relative) newbie to this now-49-year-old institution.
Each week, we pull off a miracle.
We’re a team of 17 full-time employees, four part-timers, and a handful of contractors, freelancers and delivery drivers. (Mind you, we were significantly larger just a few years ago; the reduction is a result of the pandemic and a changed landscape in the business of journalism.)
Each week, we produce and distribute a physical newspaper, eight digital newsletters, and lots of daily content on wweek.com. Throughout the year, this same team publishes three magazines, puts on a few events, manages ad campaigns for hundreds of local advertisers, and raises millions of dollars for local nonprofits through Give!Guide.
What we do with the limited resources we have is nothing short of a miracle. It is only possible because of people who work with a shared sense of purpose, high standards of quality, and a desire to lean in way beyond their job description.
Our journalism has real impact, and that doesn’t come easily.
I’ve learned more about our editorial process over the past year. Our commitment to investigative journalism, under the guidance of Managing Editor Aaron Mesh, means investing time and resources that could otherwise be spent hitting daily blog quotas or regurgitating press releases. Our reporters spend months cultivating sources, following leads that sometimes go nowhere, and embedding themselves in communities for weeks at a time to get the full scope of a potential story. (Sophie Peel and Lucas Manfield spent a week in Cave Junction for today’s cover story.) Some stories, like Nigel Jaquiss uncovering the transfer of worthless properties from the R.B. Pamplin Corp. to its employee pension fund, take years of reporting, sifting through historical background, and reviewing tax documents.
It’s also worth noting that our arts and culture reporting makes a point of seeking out hidden gems that endure in our city’s neighborhoods, whether they be teriyaki takeout joints, century-old dive bars, or a coffee shop that turns into a live-music venue after dark. The future of downtown Portland remains a puzzle, but we’re committed to highlighting the nooks and crannies that make our city great.
In an industry where attention is a commodity, we take pride in not simply capturing it but earning it, with stories we believe empower our readers to make our city better. I have been humbled by our work this year.
Revenue is a moving target.
It’s no secret that newsrooms across the country are having to pivot their business model. We’re no exception. This year, we’ve seen very modest growth across our revenue streams. Advertising has stayed flat, still the main source of revenue for our operation. Revenue from our membership program, Friends of Willamette Week, has grown about 5%.
Come Dec. 31, I estimate we will post revenues of just under $2.5 million and will make a small pre-tax profit that will go back into funding growth in 2024.
We have our eyes on more resources for essential investments: expanding our coverage, improving our digital experience, growing our audience, and finding new ways to tell our stories. These are essential investments we need to make to keep up with an evolving media landscape and bring in new readers. We seek to grow because we believe it’s how we will survive.
We need you.
Next year, Willamette Week enters its 50th year since our founding in 1974. We are a very different organization than we were in the 1980s and ‘90s (publishing 200-plus-page papers weekly and organizing weeklong music festivals), but our commitment to journalism has not shifted and our audience is larger than ever. (Last month, we saw 1.9 million impressions from 700,000 readers on wweek.com.) But we cannot do it without your support. If you haven’t yet, please join Friends of Willamette Week.
I believe WW plays a vital role in keeping this city safe for democracy, championing new voices, holding power to account, and discovering the best Portland has to offer. If you’ve read this far, my assumption is you hold a similar belief.
We plan to grow next year by expanding our sales and editorial teams. We’re working toward reaching more readers, giving you more places to find us online, adding another magazine to our schedule, helping this city reinvigorate its arts scene, and covering an election on a scale Portland has never seen before.
We hope we can count on you next year to keep reading and continue supporting our journalism.
—Anna Zusman, Publisher
Some of our investigative work this year, the impact it made, and a glimpse of the effort it took to report.
- Sophie Peel’s investigation into a troubled cannabis chain’s influence on Oregon Secretary of State Shemia Fagan. Most of you are aware by now of the impact of this story, but it’s also worth noting that Sophie began digging into La Mota’s tax liens and cash campaign contributions in 2022, months before she published her first story. She lined up hundreds of pages of public documents before typing her first word in a series that would upend state politics.
- Each week, our reporters chase down the ownership records of vacant and decaying properties suggested by our readers. Anthony Effinger followed up on a tip that one of the city’s top real estate families owned a downtown office complex and shopping plaza that had degenerated into a fentanyl den. He and Lucas Manfield were responsible for police cleaning out the property and for the Menashe family mothballing it.
- Our reporters not only break news but look for patterns in what’s happening. That means Lucas identified downtown fentanyl markets as a story of statewide significance long before they grabbed the attention of the governor. Anthony recognized that Portland’s population declines signaled a sea change, and all of our reporters asked whether the high tax burden in Portland was producing the kind of services that make people want to stay.
- And we keep following up on our scoops until we see change. Last year, Nigel Jaquiss discovered that more than 500 state employees were living in other states, many with low tax burdens, and were eligible to fly back to Oregon for meetings at taxpayer expense. It took months of additional reporting before Gov. Tina Kotek ended the policy of paying travel expenses for state employees living in other states.
Support Willamette Week in 2024. Become a Friend of Willamette Week at wweek.com/support.