After All These Years

The Skanner Says Good-bye to Its Print Edition

The influential paper covering Portland's black community will still be publishing online news.

By Julia Silverman January 17, 2020

The cutbacks in print media claimed another victim in Portland this week: The Skanner, which has been chronicling the city’s black community since 1975, announced that it will no longer publish a print edition.

The paper’s reporting, which over the years has covered everything from police shootings to gentrification to school closures and inequities, as well as celebrating leading members of the black community and providing scholarship aid to generations of students, will continue to be published online.

In a lengthy article on the paper’s website, reporter Helen Silvis wrote that, “The media landscape has changed over the last four decades and so must The Skanner. Newspapers have lost billions in advertising revenue to the new media giants, Google and Facebook.”

The announcement comes not long after the Portland Mercury, an alternative paper, announced that it would cut back its publishing schedule from once a week to bi-weekly, and the Portland Tribune said it would publish a print edition only once a week, down from twice a week. Across the border in southwest Washington, The Columbian announced in December that it was dropping its Monday print edition.

The Skanner will continue to print occasional special editions, Silvis wrote.

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