[jyl]

No comment on local TV news, as I do not watch television. The local TV stations have active online news sites, which are okay for "breaking" local news but don't cover anything in depth.

For print news, Portland has three local daily papers (Oregonian, Tribune, and Portland Business Journal) and a few weeklies (Willamette Week, Mercury, etc) and a few neighborhood weeklies (Hollywood Star, SE Examiner, NW Examiner). Oregonian is owned and produced out-of-town, runs mostly AP-wire stories with a bit of local content, and is generally considered fishwrap. Tribune is focused on local content and decent for that, PBJ is focused on local business content and quite decent. The weeklies have traditionally been focused on lifestype and entertainment, but in recent years Willamette Week has added some good investigative reporters and more real news content, while Mercury has become even more fluffy. The neighborhood weeklies do unsung work on goings-on in their neighborhoods people and places.

The biggest failing in the local news scene is, in my view, the lack of deep-digging investigative reporting and the apparent allergy of the reporters to crunching numbers and any sort of quantitative analysis. This allows all kinds of propaganda and bull-crap to get spouted by interest groups and politicians without pushback. Since readers generally are not numerate, they don't realize how they are being misled.

If I had a column in one of the local papers, I'd devote it to a daily "infographic". Give people data in a form they can understand.