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The Skanner has covered politics, policy and other community issues in Oregon and Washington for five decades.
An array of front pages from The Skanner, one of Oregon’s only Black-owned news outlets, that ended operations on Jan. 30, 2026, after 50 years of publication.
Screenshot via Historic Oregon Newspapers / OPB
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A 50-year pillar of Portland media known for reporting on policy impacts in undercovered areas — and one of the state’s only Black-owned news outlets — is shutting down.
The online newspaper was one of just a few Black-owned publications in the state before its website became inactive. The closing of The Skanner comes as Oregon’s journalism industry continues to shrink and consolidate.
As first reported by Willamette Week, The Skanner ended operations on Jan. 30.
Bernie and Bobbie Dore Foster started the newspaper in 1975, according to interviews with the Oregon Historical Society. The newspaper printed a weekly paper until 2023, when it converted to digital-only. Bernie Foster said The Skanner is closing completely now due to rapid changes in technology.
“I hope the new generation of people, that they will leave the city of Portland and this country in better shape than when they found it,” Bernie Foster told OPB.
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The Skanner joined the Portland media scene five years after the Portland Observer, one of the state’s only other Black-owned publications.
Together, the media outlets have helped train many journalists and writers, including Portland communication consultant and essayist Donovan Scribes.
“The Observer and The Skanner were important places to be able to cut your teeth,” Scribes told OPB, “and also be taken seriously within your craft as a writer and your ability to give analysis on situations.”
Scribes first worked as a reporter at The Observer before moving to The Skanner in 2014. He spent two years at the paper at a pivotal time in U.S. history: the growth of Black Lives Matter from a rallying cry and hashtag to a grassroots movement.
Scribes said working at The Skanner during that period solidified and grew his love of Black-owned publications.
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“Black media is important to telling stories that otherwise may not be told,” Scribes said.
During his time at The Skanner, he was reading through police reports in the Portland region and continued to notice the phrase “gang-related shooting.”
Scribes would then see the phrase in news stories, so he asked one of the officials in the region to sit down for an interview with him for The Skanner.
Scribes asked what the threshold was for calling something gang-related.
“In the conversation, it essentially came out that there was no rationale for the statement,” Scribes told OPB. “That Q&A being published, it was such a big thing for a lot of people in the community to finally have it be laid out that there was no rationale — because it’s something that was so normalized.”
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Lisa Loving was among the editors who worked with Scribes.
Loving, a journalism educator and author of the nonfiction book Street Journalist, started as a reporter and then moved into an editor role at The Skanner on-and-off from 2000 to 2015.
“Some of the best stories we ever did were stories where people walked in The Skanner office and just brought rolling suitcases full of documents about how they were treated badly at a local hospital, or boxes of documents about what’s happened to their child in the juvenile justice system,” Loving told OPB. “In a way, you could say The Skanner was a microcosm of how the African and African-American communities fit in the Pacific Northwest.”
Many of the print editions covering decades of The Skanner are archived with the Oregon Historical Society. The website currently shows a note saying the URL is “not found.”
Loving hopes there’s also a way to preserve the content that was on The Skanner’s website.
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“It’s the history of African Americans in the Pacific Northwest, it’s a history of communities that were built around African Americans in the Pacific Northwest, and who are the allies, who are the accomplices, who are the enemies,” Loving said. “There’s so much in there, and that is a huge loss to anyone who lives here.”
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EUGENE, Ore. — A study out of the University of Oregon is challenging a common belief about wildfires in Oregon.
Despite being so wet, researchers say forests along the Oregon Cascade Range saw a lot more fires than originally thought.
The study is the first to use tree ring scars to examine fire activity going back to the 1300s.
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UO study finds Oregon Cascade forests burned more often than assumed, even in wet zones
The study shows that Douglas fir forests saw repeated low- and moderate-severity fires over decades, which actually created gaps in the tree canopy and allowed the growth of the forests we have today.
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The study may eventually help with forest management and fire mitigation, but for now the study’s author says it brings up more questions than answers.
When Kaarin Knudson became mayor of Eugene in January 2025, her biggest problems were building more housing, making roads safer and closing the city’s $11.5-million budget gap. Her office has since balanced the city’s budget, built hundreds of new housing units and zeroed in on the most pressing transportation safety issues.
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Eugene Mayor Kaarin Knudson attends a press conference with several Oregon Mayors to speak against President Trump’s decision to deploy the National Guard on Monday, Sept. 29, 2025 in Portland, Ore.
Saskia Hatvany / OPB
But aggressive immigration enforcement and uncertainty at the federal level have been a growing concern for her constituents. That came to a head most recently on Friday, after protests against the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown escalated in downtown Eugene, leading city police to declare a riot. Federal agents deployed tear gas on protesters that evening.
Mayor Knudson joined OPB’s “Think Out Loud” to talk about the recent protests in Eugene and reflect on her first year in office. The following are highlights from the conversation, edited for brevity and clarity.
The mayor defended Eugene police’s response to the protest on Friday
“It was a really fantastic, beautiful, powerful, peaceful protest in our city center. We had a lot of businesses in Eugene and Springfield and adjacent communities closing or dedicating their revenues that day in a show of solidarity, and you know it’s very clear that there is no place in our community for reckless federal agencies, and that ICE needs to get out.
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“But what happened on Friday night was that essentially some windows were broken on the ground floor of our federal building. … Eugene police needed to step in [and] form a barrier essentially between that crowd and the federal agents who were inside that building. … The declaration of a riot occurred in that moment.
“Unfortunately, stepping across that line and the breaking of those windows really changed that circumstance. And we have to be focused on protecting people and de-escalating circumstances even when we have others engaged who are not seeking de-escalation.”
Eugene has built more housing, but affordability remains an obstacle
“We have about 4,600 people in Lane County within our dashboard and data for people who are experiencing homelessness. We know that that experience is created by there being not enough housing that is affordable to people and not nearly enough vacancies within the existing housing market.
“We permitted 413 units of new affordable housing last year, and almost 300 of those had support from our city’s Affordable Housing Trust Fund. The city council has invested about $7.5 million in a new affordable housing building that will be about 75 units and is immediately adjacent to City Hall in our downtown riverfront redevelopment area. … We opened another 130 units of market-rate housing right across another street from City Hall. … We have another almost 400 units of riverfront housing that are essentially in the queue. … We have to actually continue to even push harder on this. [The] federal context has not made that easy. Nothing has gotten better with costs of input to housing. Nothing has gotten better with interest rates or certainty in the economy.”
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The mayor is prioritizing two areas to boost transportation safety
“There are two areas where in this coming year we really need to direct our energy in a new spirit of collaboration. One is in West Eugene in our Bethel neighborhood and Highway 99. [Highway 99] really needs to be a much safer multimodal connection through the community. It connects a lot of important locations and hubs within West Eugene, so that area has to be a focus.
“The other area of work that has been heavy on my mind, especially in this past week and a half, is the interface between the University of Oregon, our main campus here in Eugene, and the gateway to our city along Franklin Boulevard and the entirety of that area. … A week and a half ago, [we] had an absolute tragedy occur where a University of Oregon PhD student, wonderful beloved member of our community, was killed while riding his bike. And that should not happen. It’s a tragedy, and it weighs heavily on me, and I think on everyone in our community who is looking at a transportation system that’s been built over 100 years and realizing that we have a lot to retrofit to make it safer and more relevant to the 21st century.”
Eugene balanced its budget, but the next years will be tough
“We were able to essentially restructure some things with our stormwater fees and our parks funding that allowed for a very small increment of increase to our local stormwater fee, which is something that was already in place, and then we made about 50% of the cuts on top of the other reductions that we’d made.
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“For anyone who’s paying attention, the next couple of years are harder. We already knew that the revenue projections two years out were not as positive as the difficult ones we were looking at just last year and the year before.
“We know that our state now is in a completely different circumstance, much of that the responsibility of the disinvestment from this federal government and this administration. … There will be a lot of responsibility on public officials and community leaders to communicate broadly about the challenges and the trade-offs that we’re facing.”
Eugene Mayor Kaarin Knudson spoke to “Think Out Loud” host Dave Miller. Click play to listen to the full conversation:
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