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.

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.

“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.”

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.

“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.”

News Source : https://www.opb.org/article/2026/02/04/one-of-oregons-few-black-owned-publications-shutters-as-newsrooms-across-state-shrink/