The Willamette Week is an alternative weekly published in Portland, Oregon. It features reports on local news, politics, and culture. In several cases, the paper has scooped The Oregonian, Portland's major daily newspaper.

Notable stories first reported by the Week include:

• Making public Neil Goldschmidt's long-concealed sexual misconduct with a fourteen-year-old girl. Goldschmidt, a former Oregon Governor, was mayor of Portland at the time of the abuse. After the Willamette Week contacted him for comments on their impending story, Goldschmidt confessed to the relationship in an interview published in the Oregonian before the Week story was set to print. However, the alternative weekly first broke the story on its website. ^*. Nigel Jaquiss won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting for his work on the story. It was only the fifth time in the prize's 88-year history that a Pulitzer was awarded to a weekly paper, and the first in five years.
• Revealing that Lewis & Clark College president Michael Mooney had made an unauthorized loan to an energy startup on which the company had defaulted ^*. The story lead to Mooney's eventual resignation.
• Sifting through the trash of the Portland's mayor, police chief, and the district attorney for Multnomah County, after prosectors argued that refuse was not protected by the Fourth Amendment ^*.
• A 1987 article which made detailed charges against homeless activist Michael Stoops, and founder of the Baloney Joe's homeless shelter, which stated extorted sex from homeless male teenagers in return for shelter and food. While a subsequent investigation confirmed the article's charges (including evidence that Stoops had contracted gonorrhea of the throat), which led to Stoops being fired and Baloney Joe's eventually being closed, this article also resulted in a backlash at Willamette Week and a loss of advertising revenue.^*
• An exposé on Mary Manin Morrissey and her Living Enrichment Center.

Notable features of the Willamette Week include:

• The "Rogue of the Week", in which a recent action by a local person or organization is criticized.
• "Winners and losers", in which the newspaper gives a brief recap of the major news events of the week, from the perspective of who benefited and who did not.

See also

Salem Monthly is Salem, Oregon's somewhat similar alternative newspaper.

External links and sources

• Official website
• The paper's Pulitzer Prize
• The Willamette Week and others win a 2005 Pulitzer Prize, only the fifth time a weekly has done so

Newspapers of Oregon | Media in Portland, Oregon | Alternative weekly newspapers