North Portland community newspaper The Sentinel posted sad news today on its website: the last copy of the nine-year-old hyperlocal paper will hit the streets this March.

Publisher Cornelius Swart is currently hoping to fundraise to maintain an online or nonprofit version of the paper via fledgling group Portland Media Lab.

The paper, written since 2001 by an all-freelance staff based "in the yellow warehouse across from the strip club, and to the left of Paul Bunyan's butt" (as the Sentinel website puts it) focused on North Portland stories and often reported on controversial issues such as the Columbia River Crossing project and neighborhood gentrification. Though the paper only came out once a month, the staff blog has been an interesting and eclectic mix of daily news and events. The paper also hosted community discussions and occasionally broke stories. The Sentinel is owned by SydHonda media and, according to its post today, relies 100 percent upon print ads.

Interviewed last year about the future of journalism in Portland, Swart said, "What I see is there's not a lot of money floating around, but there's a lot of energy. As one pile of energy declines, another pile of energy gets created."