The Portland Mercury

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The Portland Mercury
The Portland Mercury (cover).jpg
Type Alternative weekly
Format Tabloid
Owner(s)Index Publishing
PublisherRob Thompson
EditorWm. Steven Humphrey
FoundedJune 2000
LanguageEnglish
Headquarters115 SW Ash St., Suite 600
Portland, OR 97204
USA
Circulation 45,000(as of June 2014) [1]
Website www.portlandmercury.com

The Portland Mercury is an alternative bi-weekly newspaper and media company founded in 2000 in Portland, Oregon. It serves to chronicle the Portland music scene, and generally includes interviews, commentaries, reviews, and concert dates. It has an "I, Anonymous" section, in which local readers are encouraged to submit anonymous, usually impassioned, and often incendiary letters to the city at large, and Dan Savage's syndicated advice column Savage Love. There are adult, abstract and surrealist comic strips such as Maakies by Tony Millionaire, Kaz's Underworld by Kaz, and Idiot Box by Matt Bors. The Mercury is similar in style to its sibling publication, Seattle, Washington's The Stranger .

Portland, Oregon City in Oregon, United States

Portland is the largest and most populous city in the U.S. state of Oregon and the seat of Multnomah County. It is a major port in the Willamette Valley region of the Pacific Northwest, at the confluence of the Willamette and Columbia rivers. As of 2017, Portland had an estimated population of 647,805, making it the 26th-largest city in the United States, and the second-most populous in the Pacific Northwest. Approximately 2.4 million people live in the Portland metropolitan statistical area (MSA), making it the 25th most populous MSA in the United States. Its Combined Statistical Area (CSA) ranks 18th-largest with a population of around 3.2 million. Approximately 60% of Oregon's population resides within the Portland metropolitan area.

Dan Savage American sex advice columnist and gay rights campaigner

Daniel Keenan Savage is an American author, media pundit, journalist, and LGBT community activist. He writes Savage Love, an internationally syndicated relationship and sex advice column. In 2010, Savage and his husband, Terry Miller, began the It Gets Better Project to help prevent suicide among LGBT youth. He has also worked as a theater director, sometimes credited as Keenan Hollahan.

Savage Love syndicated sex-advice column by Dan Savage

Savage Love is a syndicated sex-advice column by Dan Savage. The column appears weekly in several dozen newspapers, mainly free newspapers in the US and Canada, but also newspapers in Europe and Asia. It started in 1991 with the first issue of the Seattle weekly newspaper The Stranger.

Contents

The printed paper was published weekly until Fall 2018 when it changed to bi-weekly. [2]

Contributors and staff

Current list retrieved on April 6, 2019. [3]

The Portland Mercury has published a number of notable writers and personalities, including Chelsea Cain, Chuck Palahniuk, Dan Savage, David Schmader, and Sean Tejaratchi.

Chelsea Cain American journalist and writer

Chelsea Snow Cain is an American writer of novels and columns.

Chuck Palahniuk American novelist, essayist

Charles Michael Palahniuk is an American novelist and freelance journalist, who describes his work as transgressional fiction. He is the author of the award-winning novel Fight Club, which also was made into a popular film of the same name.

David Schmader is an American writer known for his solo plays, his writing for the Seattle newsweekly The Stranger, and his annotated screenings of Paul Verhoeven's Showgirls. He is the author of the 2016 book Weed: The User's Guide.

Columns

The Portland Mercury publishes columns that often have a satirical or humorous tone. The publication's established columnists include Dan Savage, Ann Romano and Ian Karmel. The paper also often features fictional columns written by characters from pop culture or those created by members of the staff. These columns have included Elementary School Crime Blotter by Jerry Masterson, Imbecile Parade by Frank Cassano and One Hulk's Opinion by the Incredible Hulk. The Portland Mercury also publishes I, Anonymous, in which readers can submit anonymous rants and anecdotes.

The original Mercury

A weekly newspaper called the Mercury, and later the Sunday Mercury, was founded in Salem in 1869, [4] and moved to Portland a few years later. It was known for being the subject of a major libel lawsuit involving attorney and writer C.E.S. Wood. The Oregon Supreme Court ruled against O. P. Mason and B. P. Watson, and the newspaper itself was turned over to receiver A. A. Rosenthal. Rosenthal promised to "make a decent paper of it," but the paper was raided by the Portland district attorney's office later that year, and suppressed for publishing offensive material. An Oregonian article praised the plaintiffs for having "abolished a publication insidiously demoralizing as well as unspeakably offensive." [5]

Salem, Oregon State capital city in Oregon, United States

Salem is the capital of the U.S. state of Oregon, and the county seat of Marion County. It is located in the center of the Willamette Valley alongside the Willamette River, which runs north through the city. The river forms the boundary between Marion and Polk counties, and the city neighborhood of West Salem is in Polk County. Salem was founded in 1842, became the capital of the Oregon Territory in 1851, and was incorporated in 1857.

Oregon Supreme Court the highest court in the U.S. state of Oregon

The Oregon Supreme Court (OSC) is the highest state court in the U.S. state of Oregon. The only court that may reverse or modify a decision of the Oregon Supreme Court is the Supreme Court of the United States. The OSC holds court at the Oregon Supreme Court Building in Salem, Oregon, near the capitol building on State Street. The building was finished in 1914 and also houses the state's law library, while the courtroom is also used by the Oregon Court of Appeals.

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References

  1. ↑ "The Portland Mercury". Association of Alternative Newsweeklies. Archived from the original on June 15, 2010. Retrieved November 6, 2013.
  2. ↑ "Starting This Fall, The Portland Mercury Will Publish a Paper Every Other Week". Willamette Week. May 24, 2018. Retrieved March 8, 2019.
  3. ↑ "Editorial". Portland Mercury. Retrieved 6 April 2019.
  4. ↑ Turnbull, George Stanley (1939). "Journalism in Salem"  . History of Oregon Newspapers  . Binfords and Mort.
  5. ↑ Turnbull, George Stanley (1939). "Libel and Violence Bear Fruit"  . History of Oregon Newspapers  . Binfords and Mort.


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