I. Can’t. Stand. Willamette. Week.
My dislike for WW began in the Spring of 2006. I had recently moved from an apartment to a house in NE Portland. It was a hot day, full of chirping birds. Then I looked on my doorstep and saw that some jerk-off had thrown a copy of Willamette Week on our sidewalk. At first I was upset that someone in Portland wouldn’t recycle… until I realized what every one else already knows. The Willamette Week is trash. Pages of rumors, music listings and made up stories don’t deserve to be in the recycling bin along with a milk carton, Macy’s shipping box, Miller Lite 24-pack box or 1st draft of college thesis.
When you first think of Willamette Week, memories flood your cerebral cortex with happy ponderings: The first time your band was listed on the music pages. The witty liberal cartoons that made you look forward to every Wednesday. Let’s not forget my favorite game, “Guess what suburb the writers of Ask the Editor are from.” But then comes the day that you get over the Willamette Week.
Along with the minimal good stuff (Oregon political figures being brought down by sex scandals) you realize that the rest is a bunch of crap: the little nimby news stories and overly biased liberal agendas, the lack of genuine effort to report relevant thought or evidence in a particular story, the music reviews that fail to offer objective substance or information on the artist’s performance.
Basically, the Willamette Week is your old aging drunkle. He used to be hip and cool at one point. He was free and ALL over town! But the years have not been kind, and with age comes a creeping need for legitimacy, which does not really mesh with the fuck-the-man ethos of a free weekly. Just like your uncle can not concurrently hold a job, still drink every night and play in his never-quite-profitable band, the Willy Week cannot be doudy normal newspaper and quirky weekly.
After some deep investigative reporting*, I’ve found that the battle for eyes between Portland Mercury and WWeek has already been won. This community no longer feels DubDub offers anything important, though there are still some uses: Paper cut attacks. Starting fires. Wallpaper for the homeless. Prove you just moved to Portland. Wrapping Fish (Although Lars Larson believes this role is best served by the Oregonian). What else?
*I don’t do no reportin’
Things About Portland That Suck 
i only wish the mercury had a crossword! then i would never pick up a ww again.
“X-mas wish”
X-mas 2009
Dear Trimet,
A X-mas wish from our family to your’s:
My grandkids like to spend the day.
They come to visit and we play.
It’s sad to hear they had to say,
“No bus for us, nuh auh; No way!”
Those buses stink like ass-goo-soup.
We wish you’d steam or power spray
that ass-goo stinky soup away.
Till then we’ll say, “No bus for us”.
We wish you’d clean your stinky bus.
Your’s Truely,
Ann O. Nemus
People who drink Miller Lite and shop at Macys, in the town that made microbrews a household word and has more young small business owners than any other city of its size, suck.
Glad I’m not the only one who hates them. Their endless tongue bathing of the latest restaurant/club/hotel etc is truly cringe worthy. All because the owners or sales directors gave them comps or bought them lunch. Even REAL prostitutes aren’t bought off quite so cheaply as WW.
props on your loathing of the w week. they are to a weekly what fox news is to nightly news. perhaps worse when you consider what jaquiss’s three year hunt of the current mayor’s sex life is costing the city.
I’m sorry, but the Portland Mercury is MUCH worse.
This is a paper run by Brits that thinks it’s The Stranger in a town they wish was San Francisco. Plus, the writing is shit. It’s like the print version of TMZ. The last time I looked at a copy it featured an article stating hipsters should leave Portland. Insert pot / kettle / black joke here.
I’m really starting to enjoy this blog and it’s comments. It’s sad that you’re all so damn right about the town we love. To hate.
What’s sad is that you could have said the same thing in 1996, or any other year that Willamette Week was in print. WW was and always will be nothing but a workfare program for otherwise completely unemployable friends of the current editor’s. It won’t change so long as the current political climate keeps its staff from having to go back to working the deli counter at Fred Meyer, and that’s because the current economic climate means that Fred Meyer is out and they’ll just have to go back to street corners to ask “Business, mister?” Whenever I hear someone bitching about Willamette Week as if it just suddenly collapsed in quality, I can only ask “So where the hell have you been?”
Just look at the bright side. At least WW was and is better than the late and forgotten PDXS. Humorless feature writers, columnists, and reviewers blathering about humorless subjects, pretending that their dry and whiny tirades actually mean anything to anybody, all overseen by a conspiracy-obsessed twat who keeps the paper at a bathetic level of financing and journalistic quality because then he’d actually have to pay his contributors more than $10 per article…in many ways, PDXS was the complete personification of Portland journalism. Which is why nobody outside of Portland journalism gives a shit about it.
You’ve nailed it. Excellent post, angrylove.
The mercury is that rag for all the scooter gangs and stumptown coffee sipping douchebags that love a racy story as opposed to actual community interest. Now if you want a glorified Zine from the 80’s, except stuffed with ads from the establishment and dripping with vomitus graphics only a colorblind Art Institute dropout thinks look good, go for the mercury. However, a word of warning, their journalistic “insight” and “ethics” boil down to the counter culture flavor of the week; more catch phrase and snarky witticism then content.
I’m not saying WW is the bastion of the 4th branch of government only that it has consistently been more local minded in its reporting as that pertains to all of Portland not just the trendy 20 something clique du jour. Sure that means hearing from our less civilized inhabitants (Greshamites) in the letters section. And sure sometimes the writing is a little non committal (their coverage of Sam Adams Boston Libido comes to mind). But these are balanced by an engaged and relevant focus on the day to day things that make this town great. Their annual best of Portland is a sterling example of this idea.
One last thing. Citing the liberal bias being the reason to choose between these two is like trying to decide between two hookers based on the severity of their genital warts.
i agree with 97% of this. my only contention is that WW is not guilty of an “overly biased liberal agenda” (btw – what better way to out yourself as a GOP lover than to say something like that. sean hannity? is that you?) – what they are guilty of is have a confused, decreasingly relevant, “at first glance” liberal agenda.
shit. i just said “liberal agenda”. i swear i’m not a republican.