Rachel J.
Yelp
If you're reading your local alternative weekly for hard-hitting national news stories or muckraking journalism, you're doing it wrong. You know that this is a free paper and actual journalism costs money, right? This is a newspaper for people who get their news online, but want a piece of paper to physically flip through while sitting at a coffee shop ogling the hot tattooed denizens of Portland and figuring out what bands to see next. As far as I'm concerned, the Mercury is mainly arts, entertainment, events, and a bit of local political coverage, and if you expect anything much more substantial you're going to be disappointed.
I read the Mercury for movie reviews, One Day at a Time (HILARIOUS), Savage Love, I, Anonymous, show listings, restaurant reviews, and the event calendars. It was one of the first alternative weeklies I read, and it almost always made me laugh. When I lived in San Francisco and Boston I was quite disappointed in the local weeklies because they took themselves way too seriously and were rarely funny or relevant. I know what's going on in the world because I read about it in my news feeds online, and oftentimes it's fucking depressing as hell. I don't really need my local weekly to remind me of that; I just want it to entertain me and educate me about how best to enjoy this lovely town we live in.
If you want more muckraking local journalism, you probably should have subscribed (yeah, paid money) to a local paper like The Oregonian about 10 years ago, so they didn't have to cut their staff and content down to virtually nil. If you want serious reporting on world affairs, subscribe to a large newspaper like the New York Times. Just don't read this newspaper you got for free and then whine about how much of your time you wasted reading it.
P.S. I should probably disclose that in possibly his last official act on Twitter, Frank Cassano propositioned me through the Mercury's Twitter feed. And I married the guy who wrote (and originated) the video game column, "Geek Out," so maybe I have a conflict of interest.