The Oregonian

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The Oregonian
The October 2, 2004 front page of The Oregonian
Type	Daily newspaper
Format	Broadsheet

Owner	Advance Publications
Publisher	Fred A. Stickel
Editor	Sandy Rowe
Founded	1850
Headquarters	1320 SW Broadway Portland, OR 97201 United States
Circulation	323,017 Daily 384,729 Sunday^[1]

Website: OregonLive.com

The Oregonian is the major daily newspaper in Portland, Oregon, owned by Advance Publications. It is the oldest continuously published newspaper on the West Coast, ^[2] founded as a weekly by Thomas J. Dryer on December 4, 1850. The Oregonian is the largest newspaper in Oregon by circulation. It focuses its content on the Portland area but is available in most parts of Oregon.

1 History
2 Allegations of bias
3 See also
4 References
5 External links

[edit] History

1850 Founded as the Weekly Oregonian
1861 The Oregonian's ownership passes to Henry Pittock in settlement of back wages, and begins publishing on a daily basis.^[3]
1866–1872 Harvey W. Scott editor.
1881 The Sunday Oregonian is first published. The Oregonian became known as the voice of business-oriented Republicans in an age when each main point of view was represented by a Portland daily.
1922 The Oregonian puts KGW, one of Portland's first radio stations, on the air. It sells the station in the late 1940s.
1939 A Pulitzer Prize for editorial reporting is awarded to Ronald G. Callvert, associate editor.
1950 The paper is bought by S. I. Newhouse, founder of the publishing dynasty Advance Publications. The $5.6 million sale price was the largest for a single newspaper up to that time.
1953 KOIN-TV, Portland's first VHF television station, signs on, with the Oregonian as majority owner. It had bought KOIN-AM-FM in the late 1940s after selling off KGW.
1957 Staff writers William Lambert and Wallace Turner win the Pulitzer Prize for local news reporting on vice and corruption in Portland involving municipal officials and Teamsters.
1959 Bitter and violent five-year strike begins November 10, during which union workers publish their own weekly, then daily, The Portland Reporter. Wallace Turner refuses to cross picket lines and is hired as West Coast Correspondent for the New York Times.
1961 Newhouse buys the Oregon Journal, Portland's afternoon daily newspaper. Production and business operations of the two newspapers are consolidated in The Oregonian's building; their editorial staffs remain separate.
1977 As part of a larger corporate plan to exit broadcasting, the Oregonian sells off KOIN-AM-FM-TV.
1979 S. I. Newhouse dies. He turns over the operation of his company to his sons. S.I. Jr. takes responsibility for the magazines, and Donald takes over the newspapers.
1982 The Oregon Journal is shut down after declining advertising revenues, and "incorporated" into The Oregonian.
1989 The paper establishes an Asia bureau in Tokyo, Japan, becoming the first Pacific Northwest newspaper with a foreign correspondent.
1989 The paper orders its delivery trucks to return most copies of a Sunday edition because an article told readers how to sell their homes without a real estate broker. The editor responsible for the story was demoted. The Wall Street Journal cited the incident in 1992 as an example of how papers soften business coverage to appease advertisers.
1992 The paper endorses Bill Clinton for President of the United States, the first time in its history that it has endorsed a Democrat for president.^[4]
1993 The Oregonian becomes the subject of national coverage due to the fact that it was the Washington Post which broke the story of inappropriate sexual advances which led to the resignation of Oregon senator Bob Packwood four years later. This prompts some to joke, "If it matters to Oregonians, it's in the Washington Post" (a twist on a slogan heard in advertisements for The Oregonian).^[5]
1993 Newhouse appoints a new editor for the paper, Sandra Rowe, who relocates from a Virginia newspaper, The Virginian-Pilot.
1999 Staff writer Richard Read wins the Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting, for a series, The French Fry Connection, that illustrated the impact of the Asian economic crisis by profiling the local industry that exports frozen french fries.
1999 The paper wins two Overseas Press Club awards, for business and human rights reporting.
1999 The Columbia Journalism Review poll of editors ranks The Oregonian as number 12 in the list of "America's Best Newspapers" and the best of the papers owned by the Newhouse family.
2001 The paper wins the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service, for its "detailed and unflinching examination of systematic problems within the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, including harsh treatment of foreign nationals and other widespread abuses, which prompted various reforms." In addition, staff writer Tom Hallman Jr. wins the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing for a series, The Boy Behind the Mask, on a teen with a facial deformity.
2004 The paper endorses John Kerry for President of the United States--only the second time that the paper has endorsed a Democrat for president.
2007 Three Oregonian reporters—Jeff Kosseff, Bryan Denson, and Les Zaitz— are awarded the George Polk Award for national reporting, for their series of reports about the failure of a decades-old multibillion-dollar federal program. The program, established by the Javits-Wagner-O'Day Act, was intended to help people with severe disabilities find employment, but instead "awarded executives handsomely but left disabled workers in segregated jobs often paying less than minimum wage."^[6]^[7]

[edit] Allegations of bias

The Oregonian was founded by businessmen whose specific goal was to establish a Republican newspaper. It is therefore unsurprising that throughout its history it has been subject to charges of anti-labor, pro-corporate Republican bias, ^[8] nor that it has endorsed only two Democratic candidates for president in over one-hundred-forty years in 1992 and 2004.^[4]
In 2004 the paper faced criticism after a headline characterized a 1970s sexual relationship between then-mayor Neil Goldschmidt and a 14-year old girl as an "affair" rather than statutory rape.^[9]^[10]^[11]
In 2005 Americans United for Palestinian Human Rights published two reports on The Oregonian, claiming the paper under-reported Palestinian deaths in its news stories of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict and excluded the Palestinian narrative in its Opinion Pages.^[12]^[13]
Unlike most major newspapers in America, The Oregonian chooses not to have an accredited member of the Organization of News Ombudsmen on its staff, whose traditonal job is to point out inaccuracies or bias with regular editorials as well as maintaining a general standard of journalistic ethics at the paper.