Willamette Week's cover story this week reports that Republican U.S. Senator Gordon Smith's frozen food processing company employs undocumented immigrants, which is a violation of federal law. The Oregonian reports that Smith has said that he has told his firm, Smith Frozen Foods, to "go the extra mile" in ensuring that its work force is legal, and he reacted harshly to WW's piece yesterday. "It is wholly compromised of unsubstantiated and ridiculous allegations from a liberal tabloid whose purpose is to advance a left-wing agenda rather than the truth," Smith said in a statement. But WW editor Mark Zusman tells Politicker OR that no such agenda exists. "There is no purpose other than to seek to tell the truth about an important story," he says. "It's not unusual for a food processing plant to hire illegal immigrants as workers. But this is unusual because Smith is a United States senator." The WW story didn't offer definitive proof, but cited several workers who said illegal immigrants worked there. "We would not have published this story had we not been comfortable with the underlying issue -- that Smith had illegal workers," Zusman says.
The 2008 installment of Willamette Week's annual festival, held last Wednesday through Sunday, drew some 15,000 attendees to hear 218 bands at 47 shows, according to a WW press release. The only indoor festivals that remain larger are SxSW and CMJ. Performers this year included Built to Spill, Vampire Weekend, TV on the Radio, Mogwai, M. Ward, Les Savy Fav, Battles and Ratatat. "Portland proved, for the third year in a row that people here come out to support great music," says MusicfestNW executive director Trevor Solomon.
A couple of weeks ago the Portland alt-weekly broke the news that former Oregon GOP boss Craig Berkman has been giving generously to Republicans -- including Sen. John McCain -- despite claiming to be millions of dollars in debt. On Wednesday, the Washington Post turned its attention to Berkman and expanded upon the story. The McCain campaign tells the Post that they've donated Berkman's money to charity and will urge the RNC to do the same, but that doesn't placate some Berkman critics. "He used political donations and the doors those opened to build a web like a spider," says Jordan Schnitzer, the head of an Oregon investment firm who says Berkman duped him. "Someone should ask John McCain, 'With all these folks in your campaign, you couldn't put his name into Google?'"
"You made so many donations to our annual Give!Guide that we're just now finishing the tallies and making final deliveries of incentives," writes publisher Richard Meeker. The 2007 installment of the paper's annual fund-raising endeavor produced more than $518,000 for 49 nonprofits in the Portland area, more than doubling 2006's total of $228,000.
In his annual report to readers, Richard Meeker says that despite "the gloom-and-doom reports" on newspapers across the country, Willamette Week's story in 2007 "is anything but a tale from the crypt." He notes that "this will be the paper's best year ever in display sales," with sales up 7.6 percent over 2006. And although classifieds continue to decline, with sales down about $115,000, total revenue at the paper is expected to be up 4 or 5 percent from last year, with pre-tax profit expected to be about 5 percent. "If [the paper was] owned by a media conglomerate, co-owner Mark Zusman and I would have been relieved of our responsibilities long ago for unsatisfactory financial performance," Meeker writes. "While we certainly could be a little more efficient, we feel it would seriously harm the culture of our operation to try to match national averages calling for profits two to three times greater than ours."
"Over the years, Willamette Week (now owned by the paper's editor and publisher) has benefited from the great generosity of many Portlanders and has been blessed by lots of luck," writes publisher Richard Meeker. "No outsider did more for us than Dennis Lindsay, a local lawyer who died Oct. 2 of complications from a stroke." Lindsay's donation of $6,000 gave founder Ron Buel the financial confidence to start the paper in 1974. Lindsay's law firm also served as general counsel for the paper from 1974 until the early '80s, and he was the first chair of the paper's board of directors.
"We changed our logo (for the sixth time in our almost 33 years of existence), emphasizing WW rather than Willamette Week," says editor Mark Zusman. The alt-weekly also reduced the paper's height by an inch, changed the typeface, and created a new section "on all matters of living in Portland."
What began as a May 2004 story on Starbucks for Taylor Clark has turned into his first book, Starbucked: A Double Tall Tale of Caffeine, Commerce, and Culture, soon to be released by Little, Brown. The former staff writer "chronicles the rise of Starbucks from a modest Northwest operation to a global powerhouse, examines the ways the company impacts society, and what it says about our culture that the company can place stores literally within sight of one another and turn a healthy profit in both," according to a press release." Publisher's Weekly says that Clark's "dubious perspective on one of the modern world's most ubiquitous icons is just frothy enough to prove entertaining."
"MusicfestNW is that special time of year when Portland adopts the best of music everywhere and gives it a home," music editor Amy McCullough writes in an introduction to the paper's guide to the annual festival. The four days of MusicfestNW will feature over 170 sets in 16 venues, ranging "from melodic indie rock icons Spoon and Rilo Kiley to alternative hip-hop heroes Aesop Rock and the Clipse to psychedelic music legend Roky Erickson & the Explosives," Corey duBrowa writes in the Oregonian.
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